


cruel angles

by uglyguccislippers (Hyb)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Background Johnyu, Bloodplay, Hodgepodge Vampire Lore, M/M, Moon Child AU, Non-Graphic Violence, taeyong is the worst vampire
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2019-06-13 02:38:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15354384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/uglyguccislippers
Summary: Under the weight of dawn, he might imagine what Ten whispers. All he sees is blackness, his limbs are stone, and he slips away from himself like shedding a skin.Why does everyone deserve to be happy but you?[Taeyong is a vampire, albeit not a very good one.]





	1. Chapter 1

 

The reek of the meat packing plant saturates the air and carries downwind over warehouses and eyeless shuttered factories. The service roads are quiet, lit up in pools of white light and long stretches of shadow. A flurry of sound shatters the stillness like fireworks.

“Stop posing,” Taeyong calls down from atop the truck. “Left.” Despite his line of sight above the warehouse, he can't see the huddled figures beyond towering pallets sealed in plastic. But he can hear their hearts kicking.

Ten dodges quick as a snake and braces himself like an action hero, though Taeyong has told him countless times to steady his pistol with both hands. Not askew like this, hip cocked. Style would cost him if he didn't have such a sharp eye.

“I’m not,” Ten snipes belatedly.

“ _Right_ ,” Taeyong sighs, and watches him dart as instructed.

“You could help,” Johnny shouts up, then ducks behind another car when a shot rings overhead. The sound hammers upon Taeyong’s ears and he sets his molars against it.

“He doesn’t approve,” Ten sing-songs back.

“Pay attention.” Taeyong squints down at him and wonders if his face betrays the cold swoop of his gut. “Or is that fashion?”

It takes Ten two beats to twist and spot the hole through the front of his jacket, turquoise leather and glittering silver hardware buffed to shine. The last thing he should be wearing for this, when slipping into shadow can be the difference between a clean getaway and capture, or worse.

“This was _expensive_ ,” he snarls, and fires at the first flicker of movement across the warehouse.

“You stole it,” Taeyong sighs, but Ten isn’t listening.

Johnny jerks Ten down beside him for cover and rolls his eyes. “Not all of us had vampires teaching us how to dodge bullets. Chill, okay? I’m not trying to get myself ventilated tonight.”

“We don’t use the v-word,” Ten huffs at him, scrambling to his feet. He lines up another shot, aiming high to scatter and alarm.

Johnny looks bemused for a moment and then groans. “Funny, real funny.”

Unseen, something hits the cement with a thump and Taeyong drops, landing catlike on the balls of his feet at Ten’s side. He steers the hand holding his pistol down. “That’s the last one, they’re out. Get what you came for.”

 

 

 

In late January, with dirty slush clogging the gutters, no one is eating outside well past midnight. But Taeyong lays on a whisper of glamour and the staff at their preferred haunt unpack a table and chairs on the sidewalk. Strings of electric lights like red paper lanterns glow overhead. A few patrons gawk from inside, still flushed from the bars. Taeyong can taste their hot-blooded perspiration each time the door swings open and warm air rushes out.

They all look up at the sputter of an engine, too weak for a car, and a single headlight coasts into view.

“They were still awake when we got there,” Ten complains, snagging a roll of bills from his boot and tossing it to Yuta. The latter claps it from the air with ease, still balancing on his electric green scooter with the Happy Pizza logo emblazoned on the side. He tosses the cash once and frowns.

“This feels light.”

Johnny laughs under his breath and breaks a fortune cookie open, holding it under his nose to read in the dim light. “Turns out they were investing in baseball cards. You want to go back for them, be my guest.”

“What self-respecting gangsters go for baseball cards? Fuck it,” Yuta shrugs. He looks at Taeyong, at his cup of black coffee. There’s a plate in front of him, ostensibly, but nudged in Ten’s direction to pick out the shrimp and broccoli. “Did you eat or what?”

It’s only been a year since Johnny fell in with them. He’s reliable, never skims more than his take, brawny enough to hoist Ten up like a sack of rice and run. His unease with Taeyong’s diet is a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things. Maybe he tries to hide it, the nervous glance between Yuta and Taeyong, but his face is too honest by half.

“Hey, I was talking to you.” Ten shifts forward onto his elbows and briefly blocks Yuta from Taeyong’s sight. “Why are you getting a cut for your drugged pizza when they were still awake?”

Taeyong lays a palm over the nape of Ten’s neck and reels him back like scruffing a kitten. It’s too cold for him to be sitting out this late, in his leather jacket and a tissue thin shirt, but he runs his mouth too much after a job to unwind where anyone might overhear inside.

“Say it a little louder,” he murmurs, squeezing once before letting go. It’s only a mood, of course, but acknowledging Ten’s newfound territorial streak won’t help matters. At twenty his tantrums are more pointed than they were at fifteen, and far more difficult to understand. “No donors tonight,” he adds, lifting his chin to Yuta. It’s rare enough to be a blessing that they leave gunshot wounds in their wake, and even then Taeyong isn’t always inclined to feed, no matter the scent and the hunger that wrings his gut and spasms along his limbs. Not when Yuta’s cocktail of drugs gives him a headache. Not when Ten might see him.

“Get Ten home,” he nods to Johnny. Ten stabs a hunk of shrimp on the end of his chopstick and doesn’t eat it. Leaning on his handlebars, Yuta seems, inexplicably, to wait for Ten to catch his eye again. And then winks.

Squinting at the paper menu, Taeyong flicks a few bills from his pockets and frowns. Unsure, he shoves them at Johnny as well. “Leave a tip, whatever’s fair.”

“You can’t do the math,” Ten snorts, the mockery worn soft with familiarity. Bold for someone who dropped out at sixteen because it was interfering with his beauty sleep.

“My school got blown up when I was nine,” Taeyong agrees readily. He tugs off his woolen scarf and loops it crookedly over Ten’s shoulders. “What’s your excuse again?”

 

 

 

Call him neurotic, but despite certain knowledge that his body no longer harbors bacteria inherent to the living, Taeyong prefers to brush his teeth before feeding. Only polite, when the donor is a friend. He keeps a spare toothbrush at Yuta’s place, dental floss and mouthwash as well, though he doubts Yuta has ever availed himself of either. He wasn't always this finicky, he thinks. He's almost sure. But that was before. When Ten found him, after those lost grey years, he was so filthy it took three tubs of hot water to get clean again. 

“You could be nicer to Johnny,” Yuta calls from the next room.

Taeyong pops fang and pauses, blinking at his own reflection as he plays back the words. He leans out the doorway to find Yuta has slouched himself in the hall, hands shoved in his pockets.

“I have no problem with Johnny,” Taeyong mutters, and resumes drawing the floss between his fangs and incisors. They’re hypersensitive like this, exposed to air and aching for blood warmth. Flossing them is about as jarring and unpleasant as exploring the depths of his navel.

“Could still be nicer. He’s awful impressed by you,” Yuta notes, and leads the way to the misshapen disaster he calls a sofa.

He sets his teeth against Yuta’s neck with care. Delicacy is required to find the vein with only the points of his fangs, not to rend flesh. The contact ripples through Yuta with a familiar moan and he squeezes Taeyong’s thigh. 

Three years ago, Yuta had bitten his cheek, fingers twitching nervously.  _Will it hurt much?_ he asked. No longer capable of blushing, Taeyong had stuttered over his explanation all the same.  _You might notice some effects that aren't, unpleasant._

It’s lazy and pleasant to work Yuta through his shorts where he’s hard, the material slippery over the length of him, blood pulsing in time to Taeyong’s shallow sucks. Then Yuta eases his hand away. There’s no tension in him, but still Taeyong draws back, mouth hanging open like an animal to accommodate his fangs. Blood warms him from his throat, his belly.

“I’m good,” Yuta dismisses. “Just tired.”

“Then we ought to stop,” Taeyong manages, voice thick. His jaw aches with effort not to bite.

Despite a show of protest, Yuta agrees. Taeyong flexes a hand into the upholstery, a seam between cushions where his fingertips meet lint and indecipherable refuse that might be crumbs, and the ripple of disgust helps retract his fangs.

“We were talking about Johnny,” Yuta nudges him.

“It’s good for Ten to have friends his own age,” Taeyong mumbles. "Same as you. I'm glad." The room swims and he sinks back against the sofa. A spring digs beneath his hip. Yuta could afford better, but he’s a magpie like Ten. Impractical, always chasing what shines and ignoring the mundane, like the dishes piled in his sink or the stale odor of coffee grounds and putrefying taekout in the trash.

“What about the rest?” Yuta tilts his neck obligingly for the rasp of Taeyong’s tongue over the punctures, until they begin to close. “Not like Johnny will ever try anything. He knows you’d rip his throat out.”

“If he wouldn’t risk so little then he doesn’t deserve Ten,” he says, and in the moment, staring at the cracked plaster ceiling, it makes perfect sense.

“Sure.” Yuta rolls his head against the cushion, something opaque flitting through his eyes. “Hey, it’s late. You want to stay? We could always do this at your place, if it's easier.”

“No.” Sometimes, when he’s still rolling on Yuta’s blood, he sees Ten lit up in silver like Christmas tinsel, like the memory of sun on snow. He keeps this to himself.

“Still don’t let Ten see you feed? You’re so weird about it. He’s only a few years younger than me, he's not a kid anymore.”

“I didn’t ask. You brats traipse through my house, I cook for you, the least you can do is mind your own business.”

“You cook for  _Ten_ ,” Yuta corrects with insufferable surety. “We’re just. Around.”

 

 

 

Home is a ruin lovingly appointed, jewel tones glowing stark against the peeling wallpaper and hardwood floors weathered like a forgotten ship. The velvet couch, shade tree green with stuffing spilling out, lamps with silk scarves thrown over them, beads hanging in doorways. When Taeyong slits his eyes and blurs his surroundings he can see their old place again, with its trailing extension cords, siphoned electricity sapped all the more by the fairy lights Ten would festoon from the smoke yellowed moldings.

“What are you in the mood for?” Taeyong asks expecting no clear answer, already hooking a well-thumbed cookbook down from the shelf. The books are all secondhand, discolored with age and spatters of sauce from past families. He leafs through the pages blind, the order of the sections memorized. Here a note in pencil that Ten prefers more cumin in the chili, here red onions crossed out three times for emphasis. Ten likes pasta in heavy cream sauce, or skewers of beef and bell peppers, but the crisper is empty and he ate an entire pot of alfredo two days ago until it made him sick. There’s raw beef waiting in the refrigerator, sweating blood onto wax paper.

The recipe feeds six but Taeyong never bothers to cut down portions. Ten eats like he has tapeworm, always has.

Turning one of the kitchen chairs backwards, Ten props his chin on folded hands and watches Taeyong mince the garlic and the ginger.

“We should hit Chan’s idiots again next week,” he announces, and Taeyong drops his teaspoon into the coffee canister repurposed for brown sugar. “If Johnny heard right at the bar, they’re collecting from the bookies on Tuesdays now.”

Taeyong, who has not needed air in nearly fifty years, sucks in a steadying breath. “Or you could _not_ give yourselves away. If all your leads come from one bartender eavesdropping they’re going to catch on eventually.” Tumeric, coriander, cumin. Like a mantra. “We have enough.”

“It could be better,” Ten insists. “No more picking pockets for grocery money.”

Taeyong’s hands still. “I never minded doing that,” he says, soft, and Ten looks away.

“Anyway,” Ten ignores him, firm. “ I can take care of us now.”

“Stop hitting Chan’s people,” Taeyong says at last. “They were awake when we got there. Someone could have seen you. If any of them ever recognize you—”

“You’ll save me again,” Ten says, grinning like a maniac.

It’s not as if Taeyong can deny it. _The jobs are getting too big_ , he says. _Slow down_ , _fly under the radar_ , he says. But it never keeps him from Ten's side.

When the marinade has steeped he scents the bowl and can almost remember taste. Ten obligingly samples a spoonful for him and Taeyong curls a hand inches beneath his chin to catch stray drops until his pink tongue vanishes.

“More pepper,” he says decisively.

Ten has an excitable palate, though he’s never left Chicago, or so he hazards. Naperville, he says, with one of his fosters, but that didn’t count. Taeyong gathers the dinners of all the world for him. He can’t remember what his own mother would cook, when he was alive, only that there was never enough of it. But he observes the postcards and old _National Geographic_  clippings Ten has accumulated over the years for guidance.

The temples of Thailand and Indonesia wreathed in forest. The bright painted towers of Singapore. The ruins of Egypt and Greece.

Sunny places.

 

 

 

At Ten's insistence, they streak their faces in clay masks and plan for his birthday. Once upon a time Taeyong would have bid him go with Johnny and Yuta, enjoy all the deafening noise and miasma of human scent that knifes hunger through Taeyong like a heartbeat, but on Ten’s twentieth he and Yuta turned up drunk and shirtless at dawn with their nipples pierced. More supervision may be required.

The speakers waver and then pipe out something sultry. Taeyong thinks he might recognize the song, but the years all run together and his memory is only a sieve.

“What color do you want?”

“Black.”

“I don’t know why I bother asking,” Ten says, and tugs Taeyong’s heel up on his thigh.

“Black makes a statement.”

“Sure it does. It states that you lack imagination.” Ten pinches his little toe then holds it steady to paint in minute dabs. “Before you argue with me, remember you’ve said there’s a Drake song for every mood. Five times. This year. And it’s only February.”

“I’m not wrong,” Taeyong mutters, hooking his foot outward and replacing it on Ten’s thigh with the other, unpainted.

Ten smiles, quick and private. “If you say so. Just predictable, then.” He dips his head and puffs a thin cool breath over Taeyong’s toes.

“I would die for you,” Ten says, as if to himself, and a hook jerks Taeyong’s heart up to his throat. An idiot phantom sensation.

“What?” he wheezes. The clay mask crackles as he leans forward, pounding his chest where no heartbeat answers.

“The song,” Ten says, insufferably mild. His lips press tight with effort not to laugh. “It’s Prince. Johnny made me a playlist. He says I have good taste,” he preens.

“Well Johnny would know,” Taeyong mutters. Faint as a drop of cream in black coffee, the first glimmer of dawn creeps along the edges of their heavy curtains. It stings his eyes and stiffens his limbs, but he lingers.

Against the mask, dried a sage green, he can count each of Ten’s eyelashes like brushstrokes. Ten was an insufferable teenager once, with a nose that couldn’t find its place on his face, skin spotty with hormones, his voice cracking when he shouted. But he’s shed all that now. Taeyong has no one to tell, how they’re missing the most lovely and terrible rendering of all nature has to offer.

Ten should see the sun more often. People ought to see _him_. How he moves with uncommon grace, like some wild thing. Taeyong never taught him that. The eloquence in the curve of his neck, the tilt of his wrist. The sweetness of his laughing mouth.

 

 

 

It’s Ten’s twenty-first birthday and he wants to dance. They take the train north, where no one looks over their shoulder in the dark, where the street lamps hang with rainbow banners and strangers watch them. Welcoming, covetous.

Glamour always flips Taeyong’s stomach over, but it’s not such a difficult trick in the smallest of doses, not a push but a gentle suggestion. The bouncer waves them past without identification, and Ten bumps up against his side in the narrow hall leading to the heart of the noise.

He wants to dance under flashing turquoise lights, where beautiful creatures mingle and Taeyong can no longer tell the boys from the girls, or the glittering ones somewhere between.

“You seem relaxed,” Yuta says near his shoulder, leaning up against the chrome edge of the bar. He doesn’t have to shout. Taeyong can hear him, despite the music that shudders the walls, just like the clink of ice and the taps running in the bathrooms. He doesn’t have to specify, either.

“I always know where he is,” he says, pressed to Yuta’s ear for clarity, and nips him in passing. 

Ten is dancing with Johnny, easy and familiar. The gap of light between them narrows as the beat grows heavy and Ten stands on his toes as if to lick the tip of Johnny's nose only to sink back down, ducking his head and putting a few more inches of blue air between their bodies. They fit together well. Taeyong couldn't have hoped for better. Johnny curves a wide hand over Ten's hip to steady him and his face is soft as dusk.

Though Johnny hasn't broken a sweat keeping up, Ten's searching eyes find Taeyong at the bar. He makes a show of luring him out to dance, tugging his elbow and nudging Johnny to take his place, but Taeyong never thinks to resist. Not when he grins like that, young as his years, like he's never been afraid. Though Ten begins with a wrist tossed over his shoulder, half shouting taunts against his ear, the crush of bodies winds them close together. Closer, shuffling to fit, until Ten’s hips are canted up against his thigh. Taeyong spasms away but a hand curled in his hair holds him fast.

Ten’s lips are parted, a sound in his throat that Taeyong can taste rather than hear.

No one stares, no more than they’ve watched Ten since he spilled through the doors with his silvery shirt unbuttoned over his chest, his ripe unmarred throat and its sprawling tattoo, his painted eyes. The plates of the earth are opening under Taeyong’s feet but no one recognizes the disaster. Maybe Johnny and Yuta still watch from the bar but they’re no more than streaks of color in his periphery.

Ten is warm, his chest rising to meet Taeyong’s studied, needless breath, and the rhythm never leaves him. He’s the snake charmer, Taeyong thinks stupidly, a memory of a lifetime past when he believed in such things. Taeyong is enthralled, can only follow as he sways.

The pulsing bass shifts, collapses and unfurls itself into jubilant synths. The animal rolling of the crowd stumbles, then recovers under the strobing lights. Ten jolts in his skin and cranes his neck where he’s slotted up flush to Taeyong’s front. It’s Yuta he’s staring at, back at the bar, who pulses his fists in the air and points at himself.

It’s Ten’s song, he realizes. Prince, or some other soul he once knew. And it’s Ten’s heart pounding beneath his ribs, pressing against Taeyong’s chest like he could teach the shriveled muscle there the trick of it again. Ten is beaming with all his white teeth, hand gone soft at the nape of Taeyong’s neck, and better men than one dead fool would kill for him like this.

“I need air,” Taeyong shouts, breaking his hold and shoving blindly through the dancers. Too fast, too roughly, he knocks some to their knees in his haste, and still he hears Ten calling after him.

 

 

 

Three tries to snap his lighter to life, cursing, and the door swings open again behind him, the music roaring and then stifled as it slams shut. He passes the cigarette to his left without looking, allowing Ten one puff and no more. They’re stale from the freezer, Taeyong knows, though he can’t taste the difference. Menthol as well, just for Ten’s betrayed expression. The day he lets Ten pick up smoking is the day he walks into a police station and says hello, I'm a murderer, do what you want with me.

Ten passes it back to him and he's still flushed, fidgeting. His steaming white breaths are slow like he’s counting them and his sleek chest rises and falls in the vee of his shirt, piercings jutting underneath in the frigid air. He’s put on muscle lately, dense as some fruit ripened on the vine and smelling of summer. It was a mistake to look at him at all.

“Yuta says it feels good,” Ten blurts. “The bite.”

Unnerved by the black rush of hunger and fury, Taeyong touches the tip of his tongue beneath his lip to be sure. Nothing. He holds the smoke in his lungs until the ache of his fangs passes. “He's got no place talking to you about that.”

“I asked him.” Ten doesn’t budge, hands shoved in his pockets. The taut skin over his clavicles prickles in the chill.

“Don’t,” Taeyong snaps. Something is slipping from his hands, he knows it. Like water, like air. “Did he tell you how fast you could die?”

“You’re so full of shit,” Ten breathes. “You couldn’t hurt me if you tried.”

 

 

 

The train back, and Ten is dozing on Johnny’s shoulder. Across the car Yuta sits at Taeyong’s side scrolling through his phone too fast to follow, already gathering more ruffians from his endless circles of acquaintance to continue the evening.

He watches the hair fall softly over Ten’s brow, his products melted away in the heat of the club. His mouth is red as if bitten. A faint yellow bruise stands out low on his throat, days old, and Taeyong matches it helplessly to the span of Johnny’s teeth.

They pass through a long tunnel, and though Taeyong sees better than most in darkness the adjustment blinds him. The lights are burnt out, dousing them in shadow.

When they pass under the streetlamps again Ten’s eyes are open. He stares back.

 

 

 

“Johnny doesn’t fuck me,” Ten says, sprawled over the kitchen table. Taeyong drops the kettle to the stove with a clatter and hot water splashes the back of his hand.

“I like kissing him,” Ten continues, untroubled. He rests his cheek on his folded arms and doesn’t blink. “I like kissing him a lot. He’s got nice hands, too. A lot of people want me,” he adds, only a touch slurred, too frank to be bragging. “But I think Johnny would make it good.”

“That’s your business,” Taeyong manages. His voice is rusted hoarse.

“And yours.” Ten’s cat eyes are merciless, even glazed over with drink. “Tell me why I haven’t. Tell me why nobody’s touched me.”

Taeyong has bitten the inside of his cheek. Blood washes over his tongue. “I think it would be good for you. To spend more time with humans,” he says, swallowing down the iron.

“Coward,” Ten says softly. His eyelids droop shut. “How long are you going to make me wait?”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drop some kudos or a comment and I'll love you forever!
> 
> If you like yelling about vampires and/or feelings you can find me on [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Minor additions (a few hundred words or so) were made to chapter one, mostly for flow, but also to give Ten's nipples more screen time.

 

Ten snores faintly on the sofa downstairs. When Taeyong carried him there from the kitchen table he thought he might stir, and dread steeped with a guilty thrill had shivered up his spine.

But he didn’t. He turned easily into a pillow, brow furrowing and then smoothing. Taeyong drew a blanket over him and watched until the morning pricked his eyes. His face was so soft, remnants of glitter smeared over his cheek. Waiting in delirious certainty, in stillness with the remnants of night on his tongue, he thought he might shatter if Ten would only open his eyes. Reach for him.

Though Taeyong clings to the sound of breath, dawn drags him under like an anchor.

Dreams always carry him to distant shores. What shines with clarity is often fiction, he fears, while memory darkens like scorched glass every passing year. He has no one to ask, no photographs to study. No grainy Super 8 film. He would like it to be real, the way he remembers New York. The narrow apartment full of sun, a kiss on the back of his neck when he burrowed into bed. Hot coffee, bacon, toast bubbling with cheese under the broiler.

The radio in the kitchen playing jazz, it was always jazz. When he opens the oven heat rolls over his face and he spills out into the velvet night.

Brass horses breathe fire. Smoke wreathes wrought iron. The windows of the brownstone erupt outward and broken glass glitters on the asphalt. Taeyong does not run from the blaze. He flows through the storm drain like water and into the refuse, curls his jacket over his head.

A curtain is drawn back and he stumbles onto a stage under hot white lights. The seats are nearly empty.

Three figures watch him, the glare of the lamps obscuring their faces. He knows them all the same.

There. The first boy he ever loved, when he was young and stupid enough to think that was enough. Taeyong can’t see his hands but he knows them well. Long, delicate, animated when he tried to explain Riemannian manifolds, earnest despite the fact that Taeyong couldn’t follow long division, much less differential geometry.

Closer to the stage, almost discernable, he knows his maker. The scent of clove cigarettes woven into his wool coat. Taeyong’s feet are rooted and he can’t step closer, jump from the stage, run to him. He can’t remember his voice. Only the comfort of it, murmuring him through his death as he was held against a cold chest.

At the farthest corner of the theater Ten stands amid the velvet seats. The others turn in their chairs to watch him. A gurgling sound slips from his mouth.

His torn throat pours red.

 

 

 

The sun hasn’t sunken beyond the horizon yet when he wakes. Taeyong can feel it, through the bathroom window painted over in black, the safety curtain weighed down by glass beads and old nails Ten sewed up inside the hem. His limbs are as poured cement and his eyes open only to half mast, gritty and hot with the day. His makeshift bedding softens the bathtub into something kinder than a coffin, with pillows and a nest of blankets.

The tap is leaking today, dripping slow onto his big toe, but he can’t move away. The drip grows jarring as a hammer.

Being locked in always takes him back to the hospital, hooked up to wires and needles, listening to the monitors in an empty room as the sun climbed and sank through the blinds. It was winter then, too.

His senses walk where his legs cannot, and he hears the pipes groan as the kitchen tap runs. Ten’s heartbeat is steady. It’s not like him to be up so early in the evening, when the frozen days are brief and the nights long. More often Taeyong hangs from his doorway and belts verses with noisy ad libs until Ten rouses enough to throw a shoe at him.

Another heartbeat, slower. It has to be Johnny, who runs miles through parks and over bridges. His pulse is ever languid, heart sturdy as a locomotive engine.

Johnny asks if Ten is alright and he mumbles something dismissive in return.

“It’s okay, you know,” Johnny says.

Johnny says still nothing new from Yuta's usual connection, leaving them unarmed since they dropped the pieces last. The kettle hisses on the stove.

“Maybe we can do without,” Johnny says reasonably. His weight shifts and the sofa creaks. “We could use replicas in a pinch. Plan better. Nobody has to see us, if we do things right.”

Ten makes a vague sound. “Maybe. Anyway, I don’t need a gun if I’m fast enough.” His pulse hitches, once, and in the silence Taeyong wonders what passes over their faces. Ten sounds wounded, now. “I don’t _like_ shooting people.”

“I know that,” Johnny appeases. “But you don't seem to care much if you do. Not when you've got Taeyong to patch them up for you.”

“He told me once we could be thieves but not murderers.” There are years and miles in Ten's voice but he can't make sense of them, something hanging just beyond the horizon of his understanding.

Quiet. A car rumbles past and its bass shakes the windows. The sun is setting. The weight begins to ebb from Taeyong’s limbs.

Johnny clears his throat again. In the year since they met, Taeyong has never heard them sound so stilted together. Lighter than a shadow he creeps across the bathroom and slips through the door. His bare feet stir no sound in the narrow hall.

“It must be hard on him.”

“I don’t really care what’s hard on him,” Ten mutters, but his heart jolts.

Johnny scrubs his eyes with one fist curled inside the long sleeve of his sweater. “Yeah, you do. You guys are something else.” He waits. “Do you want him to change you, too?”

“Are you kidding me? He hates it. I couldn’t live like that.” It’s final, unerring. Like Ten knows the line by heart.

“But you do,” Johnny says. “You do.” As Taeyong watches he sips from one of their mugs, the wide one Ten likes for soup. He rubs it back and forth between his palms like kindling a fire, but slow, hesitant. “Yuta said you met him when you were just a kid.”

“I was thirteen,” Ten sniffs. “I had things under control.”

“Weren't you afraid?”

“He saved me,” Ten says, and this summons Taeyong from his perch atop the stairs.

“No,” he says as he descends, clear enough to carry, and Ten’s heart kicks like a snare drum, like he’s in danger. “That’s backwards. You saved me.”

Ten doesn’t turn to face him straight away. His shoulders draw tight. Last night his hair was bleached but today it’s electric blue, vivid as laundry detergent. He must have washed up at the kitchen sink, because when he turns to regard a point on the wall over Taeyong’s shoulder his face is bare and translucent with exhaustion.

“You don’t ever want to see a feral vampire,” he confides as if for Johnny’s benefit. “We’re less than animals. People are just meat to you.”

“Are there many?” Johnny wonders with admirable composure.

“Can't say I know, but none you want to meet. They tend to nest together, anyway.”

Ten rights himself without warning. The open neck of his shirt slips down one shoulder and his feet are bare and white with cold.

“We’re going to the lake. Gonna shower first,” he says, and steps wide of Taeyong in passing.

As fast as Taeyong snares him by the elbow, Ten almost slips free anyway. He’s quicker than any human ought to be, learned it on playing cards and switchblades and every other trick Taeyong ever used to dazzle him into laughing.

“Did you eat?”

A muscle jumps in Ten’s cheek. “Sure.”

“That means you ate dry cereal. I’ll make something.”

Ten wrenches free, mouth set in a hard line. “You’re not my dad,” he says, mild as the last warm breeze before a hurricane.

One arm slung over the back of the couch, Johnny does his best impression of nonchalance. He glances up only when Taeyong enters the room, as if he hadn’t overheard the taut exchange.

“Is it cold?” Taeyong asks lamely.

“The whole lake is frozen over,” Johnny gratefully supplies. “It’s been a while. Do your nose hairs still freeze? I mean, you might want a scarf.”

“I forget it's just a lake until things like this happen.” Taeyong picks a flake of paint from the doorway. “I grew up by the sea.” Funny what sticks. He lived near the Hudson River longer than the country that birthed him, but still his reflex is to orient himself with the Yellow Sea to the west.

“You don’t talk about home much,” Johnny notes, carefully neutral. The map of Taeyong's life and death must be very different in Johnny's imagination. What he calls  _home_ Taeyong calls  _the place I had to leave_.

“It wasn’t a good time to be there. I did things I’m not proud of to get by.”

Johnny laughs, soft and without humor. “I hear that. Still. If you ever wanted to talk about it,” he begins, then bites his cheek. “Not that you asked, but I’ve never been there. My parents were born here and we don’t really have roots. I always wanted to go.”

Just like Yuta has never seen Japan, he says. Ten clips pictures of Thailand like a puzzle to be solved, shorelines as far from his reach as Mars. It never occurred to Taeyong to bring any remnant of his old life with him. When he stepped off the boat with the sun in his eyes he had just one bag over his shoulder and his pockets were empty.

“I don’t want to do this forever,” Johnny admits, and it’s as if the words have pushed their way free, like green shoots breaking the soil. “No offense. I want to travel. Me and my sister always said we’d do the backpacking thing, all over Europe. Maybe Australia. I always liked the idea of places so big you feel small.”

“You should see the stars in the desert. It’s like that,” Taeyong tells him, and the naked relief that flashes across Johnny’s features feels like a slap. Something like gratitude at his understanding. He’s been unkind. It never occurred to him to wonder after Johnny’s dreams, or Yuta’s for that matter.

Or maybe he's only been blinded, he thinks as the tap cuts off upstairs. The floor in Ten’s bedroom creaks under his tread.  

 

 

 

Taeyong can’t fathom why they're going to the frozen lake in such blinding cold, but all the humans bundle up and insist. Their breath escapes them in ladders of white. Without a hot soak beforehand Taeyong is chill as marble, numb to the cold in his lungs and every invisible exhalation.

The heat is broken in Johnny’s old Mercedes, just like the tail light and something in the engine that jolts on hard turns. Yuta whines to drive with the top down, though it’s so far below freezing that the streets are empty and the wind lashes their faces pink over their scarves. Up front the two of them talk about the beaches down south, summer, rum and fresh mint over ice. Ten has never seen the ocean and is quiet. He looks straight ahead, eyes watering when the wind stings.

They pass under the weathered red arch at the edge of Chinatown, hook through quiet streets. Someone waiting at a crosswalk yelps with laughter at the sight of the convertible. Ten has told him the tourists still drift through by day for their names written in calligraphy and factory-made feng shui kittens in glass, but Taeyong has never seen them. He's only ever known the city at night, the fixed constellation of the skyline rooting him on the earth. Like a phantom limb he misses the warmth of sunlight, of colors searing and alive. But it's a cut crystal world that awaits him each evening, a jewel box, all the grime and rough edges soaked in darkness, distant starlight, glimmers of streetlamps and skyscrapers, red blinking planes passing low overhead like comets.

The frigid shore is silver and empty. The radio plays with the engine off, headlights cast on them. The surface of the lake nearest the sand blooms with frost in a sprawling pattern like flakes of mica. It’s inhumanly lovely and any other time Taeyong might meditate upon the sight of it.

Yuta scrambles for stones to skip over the ice and Johnny is drawn behind him like a shadow. Ten turns the radio to another station, a woman whose voice Taeyong ought to remember crooning about glass hearts, and sits on the hood of the car as if he knows Taeyong will join him.

The senses sit impossibly on top of each other like glass slides, contradictory images. How warm Ten was against him last night, the hot gust of his breath over Taeyong’s throat. How cold he looks now, drawn up small inside his coat.

“You’ve got your thinking face on,” Ten says.

They’ve always been comfortable. It shouldn’t be this hard. “I was remembering when you broke your arm dancing to Abba,” he lies.

But he’s said the wrong thing again. Ten bristles.

“Sometimes I wish we were strangers.” It’s so hard and so certain, like he’s biting down on an iron nail.

“Do you?” He can’t quite mask the hurt. Ten can be dramatic when the mood snares him but he’s never spiteful for the sake of wounding.

He can think of all that he’s cost Ten. The days. The warmth. Maybe a better foster family was waiting in the wings for him, with soccer practice and a dog, and Ten wouldn’t be a sneeze and a bad day away from prison.

Ten chafes his mittens together, close to his chest. There’s a hole over his thumb. “Sometimes,” he murmurs, watching the others down the shore. Yuta pulls off a glove with his teeth and lights a cigarette. He steps up into Johnny’s space and slides another into his mouth, cupped by a hand, until the tip flares to life and glows bright with his own. He lingers. His hand curls in the crook of Johnny’s arm.

“I like what we have,” Taeyong says past the stone in his throat.

“So do I,” Ten sighs. “Too much. That’s the problem, isn’t it? I try to imagine anything better and I can’t.”

Taeyong thinks of postcards under thumbtacks. Photographs of white sands and temples baking in the sun.

“I could make you want me, if we were strangers,” Ten says, propping his chin atop his knees. His teeth begin to chatter and the words are muted by wind. “But you love me instead.”

Johnny says something and Yuta laughs, loud and sweet enough to carry. Moonlight ricochets from the lake and illuminates them like dawn, their heads bent close as the smoke mingles between them.

"I’m so proud of how you’ve grown up,” Taeyong says slowly, and Ten grimaces. “But what you’re asking— I don’t see you that way. You're like the little brother I never had. Isn't that enough?”

Ten is silent so long he nearly takes the words back, cruel and false as they are. The moment feels like ice cracking, like a foot put wrong could be the end. Have I ever belonged to anyone the way I belong to you, he nearly says. There’s another word he wants, elusive, in another tongue, but Ten fills the void.

“If you say you’re sorry,” he fights out, dragging his scarf up over his nose, “I’ll jump in the lake. So don’t. I know you can’t swim.”

“You’re going to outgrow this place, and me. It’s a good thing. How it should be,” Taeyong promises, and the landslide in his chest is silent.

Ten finally looks at him. “Stop talking,” he says hoarsely.

“Love the hair,” Yuta throws over his shoulder on the drive home, the top drawn over their heads to cut the wind.

Ten sags into Taeyong’s side and it feels like a plea. “Thanks,” he mumbles, lips thick with cold.

“I thought your girl left,” Taeyong grasps for normalcy, to excise the last twenty-four hours from memory and sew up the edges like there was never anything more. “You said nobody else did your color right.”

“I went somewhere else,” Ten says, and almost covers the guilty dip in his voice.

Taeyong stills. “Tell me you didn’t go to the one on Archer. You know Chan owns that place.”

Behind the wheel, Johnny shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Yuta watches them in the rearview mirror with undisguised concern.

“It’s a big city,” Ten says flatly. “Chan doesn’t know what he owns.”

“Not the city. Chinatown." As his voice climbs Taeyong feels the air quake like a warning. "You have to be more careful in the day, what if someone recognized you?”

Ten shoves himself away to the opposite side of the car. His warmth lingers through Taeyong’s clothes and then dissipates.

“We’ll all be careful,” Johnny says.

At home, Ten storms to his room without a second glance. The door slams.

 

 

 

The hum of traffic fades from the evening rush to pulses and starts like a heart monitor, spiking with a screech of brakes or the rolling thunder of a passing stereo.

Ten tests the weight of the taser in his palm again. He’s gnawed the corners from a plate of toast with butter and jam, leaving the rest to congeal as he paces a hole in the living room floor. He's wearing his boots with thin soles, leather broken in and ready for running, and impatience is the only cause for such audible steps. It’s true that Johnny is rarely late, but Ten’s agitation crackles out of proportion to the passing minutes.

From the table he snares Ten’s phone, but the light is only an email reminding him of books stranded in a shopping cart. He thumbs open the message to Johnny, Ten’s unanswered texts stacked upon themselves, and taps out another with his thumbs. The touch screens confound him, but likely Johnny will know it’s him from the string of misspelled words.

“Calm down,” he says, and Ten halts in place. Taeyong hears his molars grind together. The tattoo up the side of his neck moves with his flexing tendons.

“If he isn’t here by one we should just go, we’re going to miss it,” Ten says with laborious composure, forcing the words between his teeth.

Taeyong frowns. “If we miss it then we’ll try for next week’s drop. And you aren’t going anywhere like this.”

“Like what?” Ten asks, dangerously mild.

“Worked up. That’s how people get hurt.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?”

And Taeyong can’t begin to summon up an answer to that, not when Ten’s eyes are so wide and dark and open. This wasn’t the script he laid down for them. Not when Ten was a teenager, too thin and too wild, and Taeyong thought they would part ways when he was old enough to look after himself. When Ten smelled only like home, tea, clean white soap. Not like this, a hothouse flower unfurling each night until the air is thick as incense.

Ten mistakes his silence and fidgets, lashes flickering. His phone buzzes.

“That’s Johnny,” he mutters, bringing the phone to his ear. He goes very still.

A voice crackles thinly and repeats itself. An intersection, Taeyong realizes, just as the sound cuts away. It’s not far. Wedged in a bleak stretch on the edge of the neighborhood where the highways converge in tangled ropes from three directions, camps of homeless huddled in the underpasses.

“They could have Johnny,” he says flatly, because Ten isn’t breathing. “Or they could just have his phone. Look at me,” he adds, and Ten does. “We’ll find him. I’ll take care of it. We need to go.”

And he repeats this, for Ten, for himself, as they cut through houses, spilling out two blocks over. Johnny’s car is parked in front of his apartment. The lights are out. When Ten hammers at the door Taeyong hears nothing inside.

Johnny never did get the lock fixed on the rear door of the Mercedes.

This much he remembers, in snapshots like a television show instead of his own life. When he rips the plastic from beneath the steering column the wires wait like clusters of veins. Stripping the wires with his teeth is sloppy, he touches them too soon and the shock up his arm punches through him like lightning. He sees nothing, hears nothing, until Ten is shaking him hard by the shoulder.

This time when the bare wires meet the engine jolts to life, a sudden roar that lurches down the car. The wheel is stiff until he yanks it hard right, then left, grinding before it softens. Taeyong tests the accelerator and slides to the passenger seat.

“Drive. Then stay in the car,” he says, and Ten is already slamming the door behind him.

A car swerves to miss them bolting through a red light. Ten is pale with concentration, revving into higher gears.

Taeyong smells blood before Ten screeches the car into park at a wild angle, front wheel bouncing up over the curb.

“Stay here,” he hisses, but Ten mutters something furious and snakes out the door.

The buildings are low here, power lines dipping overhead. A silent funeral home and the back of a dialysis clinic face the alley.

The headlights fall across an unmoving lump beside the dumpster. The only heartbeats he can hear are Ten’s, rabbiting with panic, and Johnny’s: sluggish, an eternity between each beat. Taeyong darts to his side with Ten scrambling behind him. Taeyong jerks him down, makes him small.

Taeyong feared gunshots, arteries hemorrhaging in seconds. There are none.

But Johnny’s shirt is torn down the center, sodden with blood. The bites have torn into his neck, his chest, up his long arms. He blinks his glassy eyes up at them. His lips struggle to shape a sound.

Taeyong looks up. Past the glare of the headlights he can see shadows on the rooftops, crouched like gargoyles over each side of the alley. Six of them. He can’t hold off so many, not even long enough for Ten to make it back to the car.

One stands, as if summoned, and walks off the edge of the building.

The vampire is short, neatly dressed, skin pink and warm with the same blood that stains his mouth. He touches his tongue to his upper lip and smiles with all his red teeth.

“Good to finally meet you,” he says, sweet as summer rain. “But right now you ought to hurry.”

Taeyong jerks Ten hard behind him. Johnny wheezes, too weak to move.

“Take care of him,” the vampire says mildly. “Or we will. And then he’s ours forever.”

“Why?” Taeyong rasps. The world spins. One of the vampires above chitters something too high and fast to follow and another laughs.

“Don’t go far. We’ll talk soon.”

Somehow he had allowed himself to forget how quickly other vampires could move. The old and the well-fed. He doesn’t even see them leave.

“The car,” he snaps, and Ten stares. He’s holding Johnny’s wrist. His hands are bloody. But he bolts, throwing the door open quicker than even Taeyong can run with Johnny’s weight, the impossible length of him overhanging his arms.

“Home, fast,” he mutters, and though Ten’s red hands shake he grinds the car into gear and slams into the lane, a horn screaming behind them.

“Johnny,” he says, cupping his cheek, then slapping to rouse him. There isn’t much time. “Do you want to die?”

Delirious as he is, Johnny’s eyes widen. His lips move and Taeyong can’t pretend not to hear him, hanging on to his mind by a thread.

“No,” he whispers from the cavern of his chest, and Taeyong closes his eyes in defeat.

“You won’t,” he promises. It’s a lie. Johnny will never be alive again.

 

 

 

They careen up to the long, thin house in the dark and something jolts from the shadows of the sagging porch.

“I waited,” Yuta is hissing into the night, but he chokes as Ten bolts from the car with blood down his shirt and hauls open the door, taking Johnny’s legs as Taeyong carries him beneath his arms.

They slam up the stairs, wobbling in the confined space under Johnny’s unresponsive weight. His blood drips onto the wood, the threadbare carpet runner, they smear it in streaks up the wall.

Taeyong pours Johnny into the bathtub, his legs hanging over the edge at a cruel angle. Only the whites of his eyes show. His heart beats so slowly, like a drum receding. He crowds himself into Johnny’s side, porcelain cold at his back, and curls an arm to support his head.

Red, every streak up the tub is so bright it sears his eyes. His fangs prick his lip.

“Get out,” he says thickly.

Ten and Yuta are rooted to the tile. Stricken, Yuta can’t seem to tear his eyes from Johnny. He makes some animal sound of resistance.

“He’s going to die,” Taeyong says, then bites deep into the meat of his forearm. His blood wells sluggishly without a pulse. He pushes Johnny’s slack mouth into the wound and a muffled groan of confusion echoes between them.

“It’s a death.” In his periphery, Ten laces his fingers with Yuta’s and tugs. “Shut the door. Come back at sundown.”

Blindly, Johnny latches, his blunt teeth scraping for purchase as he drinks. The door clicks shut.

When the air leaves Johnny, dread caves in his chest. Then the convulsions take him, his teeth chattering. Taeyong has only seen this act performed once. To himself. He could have it all wrong.

Johnny’s heart stops.

After so many years, Taeyong thinks he might remember how to cry.

 

 

 

When Taeyong woke that first night, he was in a soft bed, in silk pajamas not his own that whispered over his cold, hypersensitive skin. There was sweet incense in the dark room, and the steady hand of his maker stroking his hair, a gentle voice whispering him back to life or something like it.

Johnny wakes confused, legs kicking and eyes wild. The skin under his torn clothes is whole, waxen as funeral flowers.

“My teeth feel fuzzy,” he says, quiet as if he might be dreaming, but he flinches at the echo of his voice from the tiles.

“You both looked dead.” Yuta's face is haggard, his clothes stale and rumpled from the night before. Dried blood up his sleeve. “You weren’t even breathing.”

“It’s always like that,” Ten supplies, dazed as they watch Johnny pace the room, his eyes darting over every one of Ten’s drawings in ink up the wallpaper, the hanging beads that rustle when the heat kicks on, fingertips tracing the corner of a tarnished frame. The colors are overwhelming, at first. Like fireworks, shades and gradients and glittering clarity.

 

 

 

“We need some ground rules,” Taeyong announces. He finds he’s standing with his hands planted on his hips and feels like his father. If the memory is even true. He can’t remember his face, but the silhouette clangs with certainty like a struck gong in the far back reaches of his skull.

“Your job is over,” he tells Johnny, who sits on the sofa with his hands hanging numb between his knees. “Same for you,” he adds, glancing at Yuta beside him. Each time he shifts Johnny’s nostrils flare. Taeyong remembers that fresh pit of hunger with dread. “Your friends, your family. Don’t contact them. They’ll want to see you.”

Johnny looks away. “I don’t really talk to anybody but you guys,” he murmurs unhappily.

“We don’t go anywhere alone. Any of us. They have a nest. There could be more. If they didn’t follow us home they were just making a point.”

“What makes you think we’re safe just sitting here,” Ten asks from the kitchen. He circles behind the sofa and drapes a steaming towel from the microwave over Johnny’s neck. It’s a nice thought, but the sooner he adjusts to the cold the better.

“They can’t enter a living residence without permission. This is Ten’s home,” he nods to the others. “But they could have picked us off outside and they didn’t.”

“Wait, that’s real?” Yuta stares.

Johnny stirs himself. He’s wearing one of Taeyong’s most comically oversized sweatshirts and still it strains at his shoulders.

“Is it all real? Garlic, crosses, holy water?”

“No. Religious symbols aren’t going to hurt you. Not in my experience. Garlic will make you vomit blood but so will all solid food. So don’t eat. Liquids work themselves out of your pores over time, they evaporate. The lighter the better. Coffee, alcohol. Bone broth can take the edge off when you’re really hungry but it never sat right with me.”

“My last meal was pizza rolls,” Johnny says morosely. “I would’ve made it count. They weren’t even warm.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Taeyong says, and Ten sails a warning glare over Johnny’s head.

“And you really can’t go out in the sun,” Johnny hazards.

“You’ll light up like a match. That’s why we’re so vulnerable in the day when we can’t move. Fire does the trick, too.”

“Wooden stake?” Yuta guesses nervously. He picks at the cuff of his sweater, sharp with the edge of his thumbnail.

“I don’t know.” Taeyong wedges his hands in his pockets. He shouldn’t have stood up like this, like he was making a speech. He feels like a professor and he was never that.

“How can you not know?” Johnny stares. Yuta lays a consoling hand on his arm and Taeyong watches him shudder with restraint.

“There’s not an encyclopedia for this,” he says. He’s a poor excuse for a maker, exasperated already. But even Ten never had so many questions when he was young. He would rather stay up all day reading his books from the library than admit there was something he didn’t know.

“The real deal could be worse,” Ten chimes in. His tone is airy, studiously casual. “You don’t have to fly around at night with your intestines hanging out or anything.”

Taeyong gapes. “What.”

“Malaysia,” Ten shrugs. “No native vampire lore from Japan, though, isn’t that weird? I wonder how they keep them out. Or maybe no one knows they’ve been there all along.”

“I feel sick,” Johnny says. His wide shoulders draw tight. “My teeth hurt.”

“That’s the hunger,” Taeyong softens. “It does get easier.”

“Who made you?” Johnny asks. “Where are they? Can they help us?”

Something stings in his throat, like a sliver of ice. “He’s gone.”

Yuta's eyes twitch almost imperceptibly toward the vampire beside him. “How is he already gone? You’re not that old.”

“We eat people,” Taeyong snaps. “There are hunters.”

“But you wanted this?” Anger hangs poorly on Johnny’s face, lacking conviction. Like a borrowed suit. He always was too kind.

“I was dying,” Taeyong finally admits to the tense air. Ten stops breathing. He had given up asking Taeyong for answers years ago. But he owes Johnny this much, as author of all his misfortunes.

“You were young,” Ten says at last. Though his face is blank, something like water ripples through his voice.

“Tumor.” Taeyong averts his eyes, tapping the base of his neck. “It shrunk down when I was turned. Or maybe it’s gone. I don’t know.”

The bite cut through the morphine, filled him up like starlight, but even then there was no pain. He thought then, latching onto an offered wrist, that even if it was all a lie he wouldn’t mind. Not when he felt like himself again before the end. Not when he wasn’t alone, after all.

“Sorry,” Yuta says, and he sounds like he means it. Ten is quiet behind them, his chin tipping down to his chest. “Right now, though? He’s got to eat. I know that much.”

“I can help, too,” Ten says, drawing himself upright.

“No.”

They flinch back from the snarl in his voice. No - Yuta does, and Johnny. Ten rolls his eyes with aggrieved flair. Johnny has popped fang for the first time, startled, and his cut lip bleeds freely down his chin.

Taeyong measures a shallow breath through his nose. “Not from Ten. If Yuta consents, fine.”

“I can help,” Ten argues, face tightening.

“You probably have a vitamin deficiency,” Taeyong snaps. “Eat some fruit once in a while.”

“There’s two of you,” Yuta supplies nervously.

“I’ll figure something out.” It used to be easier. Pig’s blood from discreet butchers to stretch the days between a proper feed into weeks. Almost tolerable when warmed. Narrow basement clubs in New York with nightly passwords. Guilty stolen blood bags. Not now, when the patterns are too easily tracked.

Not that it matters. The nest already found them.

 

 

 

Johnny hangs from the living room ceiling. He keens a small distressed sound deep in his throat. The pads of his fingers flex uncertainly.

“The stickiness will pass in a couple of days,” Taeyong calls wearily from the kitchen. Ten slices bell peppers beside him for fajitas, the tattoos up his hand and forearms flexing as he works. They’ll need groceries soon, Taeyong thinks grimly. Especially with two humans to feed. “The humidity of your skin is changing. You’ll be dry, the less you feed.”

No, he’s told him, he doesn’t know why their hair and nails still grow, or why they still produce saliva and semen.

“I feel like a frog,” Johnny says to the ceiling. “This doesn’t even make sense.”

“Stop thinking of it like a science,” Ten calls easily, eyes down as he scoops seeds white as teeth from another pepper. “It’s magic. Magic doesn’t have to explain itself. What matters is you’re the same person, not a zombie. It’s okay.”

Given the spread of open books across the living room, more than he ever knew Ten had accumulated, Taeyong doubts he slept at all. Ten’s spiky handwriting is crammed up in the margins, pages interspersed with creased sheafs of notes, some stained with coffee rings and grease. Maybe it’s only to be expected that someone growing up with a vampire would be curious, but he never told Taeyong about his self-appointed studies.

Yuta seems untroubled at the prospect awaiting him in the evening, already crunching his way through a box of raisin bran for the extra iron. Some part of Taeyong would like to believe he’s given him nothing to fear, in their years of feeding, always careful. But he suspects he has little influence. The courage is all down to Yuta, cooing up at Johnny like nothing has changed.

Johnny cranes his head back to see Yuta’s face, hair falling in a soft black mass. Beaming with all his teeth, Yuta says something quick and teasing about a Spiderman kiss, whatever that means.

The coffee table snaps in half under Johnny’s shoulder when he falls and Taeyong jumps, Ten’s heartbeat jolting. On the floor, Johnny’s eyes are stunned round. Yuta is wheezing, hunching over to dust splinters from his shirt.

Taeyong smells the blood first.

A muffled curse and Ten is sucking the back of his finger, a clean slice welling bright between the first and second knuckle.

Johnny hasn’t learned his speed yet, or how to stop. He crashes into Ten like a truck, scenting in confusion at his hand, his mouth, panting through his fangs.

When Taeyong swats him into the wall with one lashing arm he hits high and hard. The plaster cracks and dents with the force of his impact. Johnny braces himself on the floor and draws his lip back but his growl is silenced when Taeyong grinds a palm between his shoulder blades and pins him chest down like an insect. He lowers himself to murmur into Johnny’s ear, enunciating slow and careful around his own fangs.

“If you ever try that again. I will twist your head off like a bottle cap,” he says softly. Rage trembles down his limbs. “I will rip your spine out. Do you understand me?”

When he withdraws a pace, Johnny is still. Then he rocks up to sit on his heels, palms lax and open before him. His fangs have withdrawn despite the trace of fresh blood at the corner of his mouth. Something hard and knowing passes behind his eyes.

“Have you killed people, Taeyong?” For the first time, he stares at him like some unclean thing. Like he might be a monster.

“Stop it,” Ten says sharply, jarred from his frozen shock. Unsure but defiant, his jaw tightening, ready to defend Taeyong at his worst. Taeyong can still taste his blood on the air.

He swallows so hard his jaw clicks in the hush of the room. His fangs retract.

“Yes.”

 

 

 

They can’t sulk all night. Johnny hasn’t fed.

Ten won’t leave, and maybe they’re past such polite fictions. He sits up on the back of their single armchair, toes curling into the upholstery for purchase, and watches avidly as Taeyong draws out the length of Yuta’s arm and taps the crook of his elbow until blood warms the skin.

Slow, he says, and Johnny hesitates with his fangs an inch from the skin, eyes flicking up to Yuta for permission yet again when he’s already given it three times over. Taeyong waits with a spray bottle of vinegar to bring him to his senses, should it come to that.

When Johnny drinks his eyes go heavy and unseeing. Yuta tries, unsuccessfully, to bite down a moan.

Ten stops breathing.

 

 

 

Taeyong expects resentment. But instead of retiring to the stale second bedroom, the mattress Ten and Yuta dragged three blocks by daylight, Johnny comes to him. As he shakes out his blankets into the bathtub and crooks up his knees to fit, he hears a weight shift on the floorboards outside.

Johnny slinks in and pushes the door shut behind him so gingerly the latch whispers into place. The electric light of the hall vanishes. For a moment he rocks back on his heels. He still smells of blood warmth. And then he folds his legs beneath him on the floor, cheek pillowed on his arms at the edge of the tub.

There are no more accusations in the quiet, no well-earned anger. They draw in their needless breaths in the dark room. He sees the lightless world in shades of silver and grey for the first time again through Johnny’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says, carding his heavy fingers through Johnny’s hair. His arm aches with the effort, burns to be still.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Johnny mumbles into his forearm. “I already know.” His eyes are shut so tight they furrow his brow. Taeyong thinks of childhood and the comfort of staving off nightmares for one more day.

“What do you know?” Taeyong asks, tongue thick in his mouth.

“Don’t,” Johnny murmurs. The tension in his shoulders eases minutely when Taeyong strokes a thumb behind his ear. He shudders out a breath. “The way you are with Ten. It’s the only thing that's making me feel like I can still be a person. Just let me have that.”

“You have me, too. Forever.” The weight of a mountain sits on his chest and it’s more than the dawn, more than his leaden arm stilling over Johnny’s shoulders. He waits, but either Johnny has fallen asleep or he has nothing more to say.

 

 

 

“We need to work,” Ten says just as he’s batting a box of sugary cereal into the cart, so deft and catlike that Taeyong nearly misses it.

But he replaces the box on the shelf and pulls down bran flakes with raisins instead, and dry oats after a moment’s consideration. No matter how many pills and vitamins they shove on Yuta, he’ll better absorb the iron he needs from food.

“Not the kind of work you’ve been doing,” Taeyong replies, pitched light and conversational. The all night grocery is well outside Chinatown, miles from home by bus, but still he listens for heartbeats in the next aisle. They shouldn’t assume they won’t be overheard.

“So we sit around burning through everything we’ve saved?” Ten murmurs back, glaring as if at the jars of jam on the shelf. His hair has faded to a denim blue in the past weeks, pale under the lights.

“If Johnny hears you talking about money at a time like this, it’s going to hurt,” Taeyong turns the cart wide at the end of the aisle, ticking through the plastic wrapped packages of ground beef. Stroganoff, maybe. Something heavy to keep Yuta’s weight up. “We can get by a good long while if we’re careful.”

Ten is quiet. His knuckles crack at his side. “I wouldn’t keep a dog locked up like Johnny’s been,” he says, low and tight and wounded. “He could help. Same as you always have.”

Too open. Taeyong steers them down another aisle, quiet and empty between the pickles and condiments. Electric lights hum above them and Ten’s pulse lurches unhappily.

“How long have I been here?”

Ten blinks. “Twenty years, or more. You always said you weren’t sure. That you lost time when you — weren’t yourself.” He doesn’t say _when you were feral_.

“In all that time, I’ve never known a nest in this city. How would they even connect Johnny to me? When would anyone have seen us together, do you think it was dancing? Ordering shrimp fried rice after a job?”

Ten goes still.

“Or do you think,” Taeyong continues, soft, “it could be something in the nature of our _work_?”

“You think they work for Chan,” Ten says at last, and there’s no questioning lilt. His voice is flat as a frozen lake.

“Quietly,” Taeyong murmurs, and laces their fingers together as Ten stares blankly ahead. “And it’s probably the reverse.” He squeezes his hand and slips away again, propelling the cart at a glacial pace until Ten follows.

He’s quiet through the electric cases exhaling chill vapor, through the automated cashier as Taeyong slowly jabs his way through the beeping screen and counts out change and rumpled bills.

“You let them think it was your fault,” he says at the empty bus shelter, the breeze rustling the paper bags at their feet.

“Blaming yourself won’t change anything,” Taeyong says. The bus turns a distant corner, pressurized brakes creaking. The headlights cast long eerie shadows up the road. “It doesn’t matter how it happened.”

Ten looks away and swallows. “It matters to me.”

 

 

 

The bags hit the floor just as Ten bowls into Taeyong from behind, frozen as he is inside the doorway. He pokes Taeyong in the side, grumbling, then goes still.

Johnny is sprawled over sofa, the breadth of his back looming. He rolls his body and Yuta groans under him, one hand fisting in his dark hair.

Yuta’s shirt is shoved up to his collar and his ribs heave as Johnny drinks from his chest. The sounds are wet, more tongue than teeth, and an involuntary pang of want punches Taeyong square in the gut. One of Yuta’s knees hitches higher to make room. His spine bows when he rocks up seeking friction.

Over Johnny’s shoulder he spots them at last and mouths something. He gestures once, emphatic. There’s a taser in his hand.

“ _Go away_ ,” he huffs at last, and at the sound of his voice Johnny twists to glare. His mouth is lush and ruined with red. His palm skates unseeing down Yuta’s side. He hooks a thumb in Yuta’s waistband, waits unblinking, and Taeyong knocks into Ten in his haste to retreat.

“Put the groceries away when you’re done,” he hollers, and yanks the front door behind them.

Ten eyes the buzzing street lamps. His face is red. “I could eat,” he says.

“Starving,” Taeyong agrees tersely.

 

 

 

They have a new diner, just like they have a new grocery, new bus routes, every old haunt abandoned. This one serves pancakes the size of hubcaps  all night and pretty Jungwoo with hair pink as his apron seems to work every evening. He beams to see them and the stud in his tongue flashes when he grins pouring Ten’s coffee.

“You’re taking this all in stride.”

Ten rolls his eyes. “Almost half my life I've lived with you. What do you want me to do, freak out? He’s still Johnny. He just can’t steal my fries anymore.”

A pile grows beside the saucer as Ten rips packets of sugar into his coffee. Taeyong studies his artful hands, his tattoos. The ones he acquires like magic by daylight. A wreath of thistles over his right wrist, a horned demon up the back of his left hand, open mouth and fangs capping his knuckles. He thought they were all style, but now he wonders.

“You've helped Johnny,” he says. “All your research. I think you have more answers for him than I do.”

“You sound surprised.” The spoon scrapes and squeaks as Ten stirs. “Did you forget I can read?”

He saves Taeyong from answering and admitting yet another injustice by swinging out of his seat to visit the jukebox. The coins chime and “Train in Vain” jangles to fill the air. Ten put on the same album last time though he only knows The Clash from Taeyong’s lectures. His foot taps gratefully and the corner of Ten’s mouth twitches.

“Punk hit right when I was turned,” Taeyong volunteers. He can’t remember if he ever said so. He never wanted to discuss how he was made, before. “I was angrier than I thought. But I was happy, too. It made sense to me. Plus, people tend to bleed in mosh pits.”

They wait for Jungwoo to deposit their plates. Ten returns his wink, compliments his hair just like he did last week. The trouble is finding opportunities for them to talk at leisure. Taeyong won’t have the humans venturing out at night alone, not even with each other for company. And he won’t let Ten out of his sight with Johnny. But someone like Jungwoo could be good for Ten. Sweet, clever. A first time worth remembering, worth forgetting any confused notions he had about Taeyong before.

He spears a piece of bacon onto Ten’s plate and waits for him to dig in, but he’s fidgeting with the paper ring on his napkin.

“You don't look so good,” he says.

“I won't feed from you,” Taeyong cuts him off before he can continue. “Eat your food.”

“You should.” Ten flicks a packet of sugar at him. “You're being stubborn for no reason.”

“Never,” he says tightly. Electric lights shiver and swim at the edge of his sight. “I will never feed from you. We aren’t having this conversation.”

“Do you find me that repulsive?” Ten wonders after a beat of silence. He curls in around his coffee, steam trailing up around him like some holy apparition. “I won't get any ideas. If that's what you're worried about.”

The jukebox fades into “Bankrobber”. Taeyong wants to tell him a story, something about kicking skinheads with steel-toed boots and clubs with sticky carpets, about stumbling home reeking of smoke to the brownstone with its lush carpets and incense. He wants, more than anything, to make him laugh again.

“Jungwoo seems like he gets all his vitamins,” Ten says then, and his thin smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “We should talk to him sometime. Sometime soon. I worry about you.”

“Is that why you wanted to keep coming here?” Taeyong asks, winded with disbelief.

The door chimes and Jungwoo glances up from wiping down the counters. He smiles so warmly that Taeyong follows his gaze.

A man turns down the collar of his black coat at the door. He’s handsome, in an imposing way, pink from the cold. His scarf is cashmere and his gloves the kind of fine seasoned leather that flexes like living skin. Jungwoo’s greeting is returned with a nod.

The man ducks his fair head to address an older couple seated nearest the door.

“Leave,” he says mildly, and they rise. They walk away from their plates, their purses, their coats. Their eyes are flat and unseeing with glamour like Taeyong has never seen before.

Behind him stands the vampire from the alley. He grins when he meets Taeyong’s eyes. He sidesteps his companion, who is clearing the next booth with the same flat, imperious tone.

“Good to see you again,” he says when he reaches their table. Taeyong watches Ten grip his switchblade inside his pocket. The taller vampire, so rosy Taeyong mistook him for human, is emptying the counter now. His face never changes. The humans march away and never look back.

“My name is Taeil,” the vampire announces, peeling off his gloves. “And this is Jaehyun. We’re going to be friends, all of us. I think that’s for the best, don’t you?”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for your patience with this story! As you can see, things. Happened.
> 
> Find me on [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)


	3. Chapter 3

 

In summer the nights come late. The heat sinks into the pavement and is slow to fade. The air is close in the bathroom as Taeyong peels the covering from Ten’s newest tattoo, the tape hitching faintly upon the fine hairs of his nape.

The surface of his skin is a mess of ointment, seeping plasma, spots of bright fresh blood, and the bandage Taeyong discards is splashed with a distorted outline in dark ink. In the mirror Ten’s eyes follow him. Maybe the tattoo still stings, because he seems tense as Taeyong reaches around him to adjust the taps and work the bar of scentless white soap to a lather between his palms.

Just now, leaning close behind, the scent of his blood is intoxicating. It would be bitter, Taeyong thinks, with the ink. Muddied and thinned. Like this, he could lap it from Ten’s skin and never violate the holy boundaries of his body, unlike the needle that must have plunged inside him a thousand times over that day.

With one hand he gentles the lather over skin, guiding circles. Ten jolts and then seems to catch himself. He laughs under his breath and Taeyong watches him bite his cheek. Compared to last summer his face seems leaner somehow and yet the notches of his spine are less pronounced, his shoulders broader.

“Am I hurting you?” he asks. The soap cuts through the blood scent and ink tinged rivulets begin to meander down Ten’s chest, pooling at his collarbone before spilling over.

“No.” A shallow breath lifts his chest. The silver bars that pierce him there clap up the light like winking eyes.

The composition reveals itself, crisp and dark. Taeyong knows the shape of it well enough. Ten had drawn it up the wall in charcoal and studied it for weeks, adjusting his lines with chalk as his palms turned dusty and Taeyong pestered him to stop for dinner. The design stretches from beneath Ten’s left ear to the crook above his shoulder blade, trailing up the back of his neck where he can’t see on his own. A three-headed raven with six wings flared, each pinion distinct. Its talons cling to a pair of crossed keys. A wreath of greenery lies subjacent and the fronds are delicate as veins. Ten said they were cypress, and when Taeyong asked why he only shrugged.

“What do you think?” Ten presses in a rush. It sounds like he’s been holding the question stoppered behind his teeth.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Taeyong says, and means it. Terrible, but beautiful. Like an unsettling dream full of portents. Not that he ever believed them, but he knew someone who did. “It suits you.”

Ten ducks his head to hide how much this pleases him and then hisses at the pull of skin.

“That’s nice,” he mumbles as Taeyong glides fresh ointment over the expanse. His eyes are still downcast.

The words are too small. To say that when Ten ran and bled and found him under a bridge eating rats, when his world had shrunken to dark corners and broken cinder blocks and watching the sunlight creep across the rubble, wondering if it would take him, wondering if he cared— he never thought, then, that he would ever be in a place like this again. In the company of someone who could make him a person and not a body. That he could feel something so human and so tender. You gave me my soul back, he doesn’t say.

“It suits you,” he mutters again, and the inexplicable shyness of Ten’s glance in the mirror stops his hand.

Ten parts his lips but nothing comes out. He swallows. This is how Taeyong will remember him, he thinks. All the sweetness he carries under his lacquered assurance. The earnest shape of his mouth.

“I’m glad you like it,” Ten says.

 

 

When Jungwoo bustles back to their table Taeil rises onto his toes and brushes an indulgent kiss over his cheek. His wool coat is peacock blue with shining brass buttons and he looks like he belongs anywhere but this empty diner with its scuffed linoleum and fat black flies.

“Be a dear,” Taeil says and pats Jungwoo’s arm. The waiter locks the door as the bell chimes over the last receding back. He tugs pulleys at the windows and metal security blinds descend on squeaking gears. The street lamps and slow passing cars vanish. At Taeil’s expectant glance he darts and jerks the plug of the jukebox from the wall. The voice is cut and the heat groans on in the quiet.

The one he called Jaehyun tucks his gloves inside his coat and jerks his chin in Ten’s direction. “Other side. Move.”

Ten snorts. His heart pounds so hard Taeyong can see the vein leap up his neck. And Taeyong, dizzy with hunger, isn’t fast enough, strong enough to protect him. Useless again. All he can do is hope and buy time.

“Have you considered getting fucked? Sideways,” Ten adds mildly. His lips scarcely move.

But Jaehyun doesn’t lash out. He hums. Taeil chuckles beside him, untroubled.

“Move to the other side of the booth,” Jaehyun repeats, voice flat as a becalmed sea, and Ten’s eyes widen just before he lurches up and drops down hard beside Taeyong, their shoulders and knees knocking. A woman in a ball cap slides two plates into an open window from the kitchen but halts, staring at the empty booths with her hand over the bell.

“Go home,” Jaehyun says, unblinking. She turns her back on them, head stiff and upright. After a beat of quiet an unseen door clatters shut.

“Thank you, darling.” Taeil slides into the vacated seat. Unhurried, he pulls out a pocket datebook crammed with notes. He crosses something off in the margins and writes another note beneath it, too cramped to read upside down.

Taeyong, faint with disbelief, can’t help but feel as though he’s about to be scolded by his grandmother. The lingering smell of tea is the same.

“We appreciate you not insulting us by trying to leave town,” Taeil is saying as Jaehyun sinks down beside him. “That's promising, for you.”

Taeyong swallows. His mouth is dry. “You want to talk to me, fine. You’ve got my attention. Let him go, he’ll just be bored. Humans don’t have the best attention spans, do they?”

“No,” Taeil says. Jaehyun laughs through his nose. He’s toying with Taeil’s shining black hair, carding it back from the crown of his head between long pale fingers. “No, he’s relevant to the discussion at hand. A shame your fledging couldn’t be here. I hope you’re socializing him, Taeyong,” he says easily, like Taeyong doesn’t jolt at the sound of his name. “You know how impressionable children can be.

“You’ll have to set a better example for our Johnny in the future. Either you've been flouting the hierarchy or you can't control your humans.”

Jungwoo still hovers between the empty counter and the peeling leatherette booths, red as old blood. After watching him without expression, Jaehyun finally curls a thin smile and touches his tongue to his upper lip. Coloring, Jungwoo steps back against the counter.

“Say we extend the benefit of the doubt and assume you were acting in ignorance. You didn’t cover your tracks well. And if it had been a human matter we would have let our associates handle it. But there was you,” he studies Taeyong. “Feeding. Don’t misunderstand, your amateur fumblings are low on our list of priorities. But just now, we need all our loose ends sewn up. Consider this the meeting before the meeting. We’ll see you again. Tomorrow will do. Ten on the dot, be ready at home and transportation will be provided. Even you can stay out of trouble for one _day_ , can’t you?”

“I have no idea what you want from me,” Taeyong says slowly. He covers Ten’s left hand with his own beneath the table and hears his right creak a fist inside the pocket of his jacket. “You didn’t have to drag Johnny into this. We can pay back what we owe.”

Ten chokes an involuntary sound of protest.

“I remember you,” Taeil smiles at him. He nudges the mess of sodden pancakes and bacon across the table. “By all means, finish your meal. You need your strength.”

“You murdered my friend.” Ten is so tense Taeyong can feel him humming like a plucked wire.

Taeil tilts his head a fraction to the left. “We gave him a gift,” he demurs. “Beyond measure. After all the inconvenience you’ve caused us, I’d say we were generous.”

“More than generous.” Jaehyun doesn’t blink. He sips Ten’s coffee and grimaces at its sweetness. “They should have eaten him.”

Taeil reaches out and what he intends Taeyong can never guess, because Ten, beautiful and quick and out of his mind, stabs him through the hand.

The plate shatters on the floor as Jaehyun grabs Ten by the wrist. Taeyong snatches at his arm but already his grip is loosening. He snarls and backhands Taeyong so hard the world spins black.

“Put your hands flat on the table,” Jaehyun grinds out in his hollow voice, and as Taeyong’s sight returns he watches Ten obey. Taeil plucks the switchblade from the back of his hand and the wound is dark, welling only slowly with thick blood and no pulse to hasten it along. The table below is gouged.

Beside him, Jaehyun’s lip curls back over his teeth as he stares down at his palm. A livid red burn has eaten into the flesh. Taeyong stares and matches it in disbelief to Ten’s rigid hands atop the formica, the width of the tattoo encircling his wrist. Thistles and leaves, no more, but the air is singed as if by lightning.

Jungwoo is fussing with a clean towel over their injuries and Jaehyun plucks it up and binds his hand. But he lifts Taeil’s palm reverently and laps at the wound. A shiver of unease drags down Taeyong’s spine to watch him, eyes heavy and enraptured. Taeil strokes his pale hair with his free hand and studies Ten anew.

“What a prize you must be,” his eyes flicker back to Ten’s hands, “To have gifts like those. To move like one of us. To smell the way you do.” At last Jaehyun withdraws, expression narrow with warning as his thumb traces circles over the back of Taeil’s hand. “I think we've been more than lenient out of respect for your property. We were hoping you could rein in your pets, but that doesn’t look to be the case. _Is_ he yours?”

“Yes,” Taeyong says immediately. Ten’s hands flex painfully in place. “He’s my responsibility.”

Jaehyun smiles with all his teeth for the first time. His dimples ought to soften his face but his eyes are glittering with malice. “Then prove it.”

He could feign ignorance. “No,” he says thickly, and he can’t meet Ten’s eyes.

Jaehyun beams. “Stop breathing."

And Ten does. His eyes widen. He grips Taeyong’s sleeve and opens his mouth on nothing.

Taeyong tries telling him to breathe but he’s too unsteady. The glamour won’t take, if he could overpower it at all.

There is a memory, though Taeyong can no longer be sure if it’s true. Of dusk, and watching a body fall such a long, long way into a ravine. How in those terrible seconds stretching an eternity before impact he knew there was nothing to be done, that he was helpless.

Taeyong can’t recall what sound he makes, what words, but Jaehyun murmurs his satisfaction and grants Ten his breath again, his hands.

The shirt Ten wears is silk, blooming with chrysanthemums. With the silver in his ears and his many rings he gathers up the light like a mirage. Taeyong stares at a flower on his collar. Chrysanthemums are funeral flowers, he recalls as if standing at a great distance and watching himself. There were no flowers the year his father died, but so many funerals.

If he could apologize, he would. He would ask Ten to trust him. Forgive him. But Taeyong steers him by the shoulder and when he tips his chin back, elongating his throat, he can see that Ten understands. The slow realization, the way his lips part and he doesn’t blink.

Ten swallows and curls his hand in Taeyong’s shirt beneath his jacket. He keeps his eyes open.

“Don’t get shy on me now,” he murmurs near his ear, so steady even Taeyong could believe they had done this before. As if sensing his hesitation, Ten tilts his neck. Taeil makes an indistinct sound like approval but Taeyong couldn’t see their faces now if he tried.

This is what he’s refused to teach Johnny. He guides him to Yuta’s flesh, where he can lap the blood safely, in shallow pulls. Never the supple inward thigh. Never the neck.

He kisses the skin first, the pale gold of Ten’s right side untouched by the ink that climbs up his left. As if warning him of the cold might help. The gasp Ten bites back is dovelike, soft. He’s so warm, adrenaline and his pounding heart rushing blood to his extremities, singing hot up his neck. Perspiration pricks his skin.

When Taeyong slips his fangs inside Ten shudders, both hands clutching at his waist not to dislodge himself.

He shudders and Taeyong seizes him hard against his chest, cradling his spine as he begins to react. The others have no right to whatever is unfolding over Ten’s face.

There is no struggle. Ten trusts him too well. And Taeyong tries to cause no pain. But the venom hits so quickly and it leaves Ten keening at the back of his throat. He hardens against Taeyong’s stomach and a long liquid moan spills from him. The sharpness of preejaculate mingles with the overpowering scent of the blood.

What awful mercy that Taeyong can’t see him. That he doesn’t have to watch his eyes as he swallows and groans and crushes him closer. The blood lights him up like sparks tumbling from the tip of his tongue down his throat, heating his belly. It feels as if his scalp is being lifted, his mouth burnt. Every part of Ten is in him. The salt of his sweat, the sweetness of his meal on his breath, the fragrance of his hair all lacing the heady iron rush. He tastes like kissing a knife.

Taeyong draws away. The lights blind him.

“Keep going,” one of them says. He can’t make out which. Sound ripples as if underwater.

“No, that’s enough,” the other murmurs. Taeil, he thinks.

When his vision clears he finds the vampires riveted as hawks, poised upon Ten’s shaken breath. Their eyes are blown dark. They follow Taeyong as he bends his head and licks the wound.

Small and raw, he hears Ten gasp his name.

“Leave it,” Taeil lifts his chin.

Taeyong can only set his jaw and glare. He stops. Slowly Ten shifts from his lap to the seat beside him. Despite the blood lost his cheeks are hectic with warmth. He really does glimmer like tinsel, Taeyong thinks in despair. Lighting him up in silver. It’s even worse than he imagined.

Worse for Ten, as well. He’s bent forward at the waist and his arousal has yet to subside.

“I could _make_ you come,” Jaehyun laughs with his lovely unkind eyes. Under the table Ten claws his fingertips into Taeyong’s thigh.

Taeil clicks his tongue. “That won’t be necessary.” Something has eased in him. He looks no more concerned than if he were sitting down to supper with old friends. Under the lights he flexes his wounded hand once, as if considering. But he smiles at them both. It reaches the corner of his eyes. Taeyong thinks in spite of himself that he might have been a kind man, when he was living.

“My congratulations to you both. And thank you for your cooperation.”

Slow trails of blood seep into a white flower at Ten’s collar. The air is thick with his adrenaline spiked sweat, the heady bitterness as he leaks unsatisfied into his clothes.

At the door Jaehyun pulls on his leather gloves and measures them with another glance over his shoulder. He says nothing. His black coat vanishes and the clashing bells sound like a scream to Taeyong’s aching ears.

In the empty diner Jungwoo sweeps up the shattered mess from the floor. He cracks a door and calls something back to the kitchen, voice lilting uncertainly, but there’s no answer. Taeyong is too blood drunk and his thoughts scrape together like stones, indistinct. Ten’s heat sears him from belly to chest.

When he finds them gaping at him, Jungwoo falters in his stride.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he mutters. His voice is softer than Taeyong has ever heard it. “They’re great. You didn’t have to be so rude. What, did you die?” he cuts Taeyong off just as he curls his lip to snarl. “I didn’t think so.”

“You should be afraid of me,” Taeyong rasps. The shock is fading and rage shakes him from his paper skin to his bones. If Ten weren’t sitting between them he thinks he could rip out Jungwoo’s throat where he stands.

With an unsteady hand Ten snares his knife where it fell. He closes it after a struggle and slips it back in his pocket.

Jungwoo rakes them both with a withering look and brushes his palms over the apron at his waist. He looks so young with his hair pale as candy floss fallen over his brow, but Taeyong has killed younger.

“Of you?” he scoffs at last. He tugs a stack of paper napkins from the counter and hands them to Ten to staunch the blood. “Hurt me and you’d really piss them off.”

“Why?” Ten’s voice sounds distant. He traces the gouge in the table with his thumb while the fistful of napkins at his neck blossom red. “Do they pay you?”

There’s a brittle dignity in the way Jungwoo lifts his chin, defying them. “I’m never going to get old, or sick,” he says.

The red tide of rage dissipates. Ten makes an unreadable sound that could be outrage, or understanding. Taeyong can’t bear to look at him. He tastes him still, like the sea.

“You don’t want to live forever,” he says.

Jungwoo’s jaw hardens. “Easy to say when you already are.”

 

 

They make it one block, and another, and then he’s yanking Ten into the tight alley to cling to him, shuddering open-mouthed against his hair.

“It’s okay, we’re okay,” Ten is saying all in a rush. He reels him back and holds his face. Taeyong feels wild, dizzy. Ten rubs a thumb over his cheek and winces. “Taeyong, I’m so sorry.” His eyes are shadow and starlight and he’s all Taeyong can taste on the air. “Tell me you’re okay, what can I do—” and Taeyong kisses him then, cuts his mouth on the mindless spring of his fangs and licks him open.

There’s blood down Ten’s chin, blood still tacky and fresh at his neck. His face contorts with something more than pain and he sags back against the brick when his knees buckle. His hand fists in Taeyong’s jacket.

“You should go,” Taeyong croaks. Ten blinks, uncomprehending, and rubs the back of his hand over his chin. “You should take everything and go. When the sun comes up.”

“Well that sounds like a dumb fucking idea,” Ten shivers. Taeyong kisses him again, helplessly. It’s shallow, crooked, messy. Ten pants through his open mouth when they part. Belatedly, Taeyong retreats a pace from him and his clamoring pulse.

“I hurt them both,” he wavers, eyes fastened on Taeyong’s mouth. “And I'm still here. They wanted you to turn Johnny. They could’ve fucked us up before now if they’re so connected. But we’re fine. We’re gonna be fine. I’m not afraid of them.”

“You stopped _breathing_ ,” Taeyong forces past the stone in his throat.

Ten hitches one shoulder. “So what? I had you.”

 

 

From the kitchen, Johnny’s voice carries up the stairs. He’s telling Yuta to leave. A harsh peal of laughter answers him.

Ten hesitates at the threshold of his bedroom. He sips from the half empty mug of orange juice Taeyong pressed on him. The blood has darkened to rust on his ruined shirt and a bandage is plastered over his neck. Taeyong aches to peel it away and make him whole again.

“Yuta won’t leave,” Ten says.

The voices soften below them. Taeyong leans heavily into the doorframe. “No, he won’t.”

“So we’re going,” Ten repeats. They said as much already. But here in the doorway it hangs as a covenant between them. _Where you go, I go_. Hasn’t it always been the way.

“You don’t think I can take them?” Taeyong laughs like a cough.

“I don’t want you to.” Ten doesn’t blink. He pinches Taeyong’s sleeve. He breathes out softly through his mouth, slower on the inhale. Taeyong closes his eyes and feels the words before they come.

“When you kissed me,” Ten says unevenly. When Taeyong steadies himself to look he finds his dark eyes roaming his face like he’s being captured in snapshots, one detail at a time. “Was it just the blood?”

Now, Taeyong could lie. Ten would let him lie. He could walk down the hall and fit himself to the cold echoes of the bathtub. It would be a kind of ending, he thinks. But the fear is in him still. The stuttering of Ten’s heart, his shaking hands knotted in Taeyong’s shirt as Taeyong cradled his life on his tongue.

“It wasn’t.” He steps over the threshold. Ten moves with him as if tugged on a string. Unseen, he hooks the door shut with his heel and the sound reverberates with finality. All these tumbled moments since Ten melted close to him under turquoise lights.

When Taeyong reaches for him his breath jolts and his heart with it. But he only turns his wrist to make out the shadow of the thistle tattoo. Ten is blind and fumbles for the single lamp, leaves his mug teetering at the edge of the dresser. His pulse jumps in Taeyong’s hand. Then the light is pale gold around them, filling up the corners of the room with misty uncertainty.

Taeyong traces the tattoo with a fingertip and studies the delicate lines. Jaehyun burned. But he feels only the drum of warm blood and the nervous spasm of Ten’s fingers.

“How did you do that?”

“Got lucky. Wasn’t enough. You said I was yours,” Ten says all in a rush. “Did you mean it?”

The spring that Ten broke his arm, tipping over the bannister dancing, Taeyong had helped him to bed still dizzy on painkillers. He never went in Ten’s room, not since they had rooms at all.

On the other side of the dresser, not visible from the hallway, Ten had drawn him up the wall. Just his face, the edges too clean and perfect from memory. He had darkened the eyes until they looked watchful and alive. They never brought it up again.

The words crowd Taeyong’s throat. He noses Ten’s cheek instead, and down the slope of his jaw. The air quakes between them. Ten’s hand threads through his hair.

“Sometimes, in my dreams— I drain you dry,” Taeyong croaks. Ten doesn’t pull away. The hand in his hair strokes like the tide. “But when I’m awake,” he draws back and follows the flicker of Ten’s lashes. “I think about kissing you all the time.”

Ten’s face collapses. He seems to struggle for air.

“So kiss me.”

Taeyong snares his hand unsteadily and grazes lips across his palm. Upends it to kiss the demon in ink that splays up the back of his left hand. It’s inert against his skin. He kisses his right palm, and the sleek inner flesh of his wrist. When he mouths the curve beneath his muscle where his shirt parts, butts his cheek helplessly into its warmth, Ten’s hands claw for his shoulders. He pushes Taeyong’s jacket off by inches and watches his face.

Under his shirt tangle the three chains Taeyong always wears. Ten unclasps them one by one with his unsteady hands as Taeyong kisses his clavicles. A blunt iron axe no longer than his thumbnail. A ring of green jade. A wheel with eight spokes etched into a disc as thin as a dime. They were all gifts, prizes of Ten’s magpie eye. He wonders now at what they mean.

“I missed you,” Ten says as the dawn drags Taeyong under, so quiet it could be a dream. He’s leaden with his cheek turned to Ten’s trembling side and no words will come. “I’ve been missing you. All day. Sometimes even when you’re around.”

 

 

When he wakes his limbs are still weighed down with the sun. Ten is tracing the bridge of his nose, the bow of his mouth. The curtains must be drawn, dark as it is, but Ten has pulled the sheet over their heads anyway.

“People are here,” he murmurs.

Taeyong is unable to summon more than a groan from his chest.

“Outside. They’ve been here all day.”

Breath comes to him slowly. Ten noses his cheek, and down his throat where the air rasps.

“Do you know you match your breathing to mine?” his voice floats with forced levity. “You do it all the time. I watch you.”

“It’s habit,” Taeyong admits, the words slow and rough as sandpaper. “I’m always listening for your heartbeat.”

Something unreadable crosses Ten’s face. His fingers spasm. “Oh.”

Yuta is pacing downstairs. Every time he passes Johnny, whose eyes are still heavy and unfocused, he passes a hand over his hair. “I know we’re _going_ ,” he admits. “I just hate waiting for something to happen. They’re— not terrible. I guess.”

“I think they all might be crazy,” Ten sighs. “But we can work with crazy.”

 _They_ are a pair of men waiting on the sagging front porch with a nonchalance that belies their alert posture. One is tall, a hip cocked against the peeling pillar as if he were watching the road. The second is alarmingly broad. But they’re human, sleek and rolling with muscular heat like racehorses.

“Yo, you’re up,” one of them beams at Taeyong. His teeth are very white and the seams of his denim jacket look strained to screaming. “I’m Hoseok, which one are you? We’d better do a headcount, no big deal.”

“ _Names_ , what did we just talk about,” the taller sighs. When he speaks, his voice is sweeter than it ought to be, with a roundness to its vowels. The fall of his jacket almost conceals the bulge of a holster over his ribs.

“Right, right,” the first nods, untroubled. “Right, so call me Wonho. This is Shownu, and Jooheon’s out back. You should let him in or he's going to piss in your weeds, he’s got a bladder like a kitten.” Wonho speaks with his hands. He has a yellow bandage on his knuckle, like a child’s, patterned with butterflies.

“We didn’t want anyone panicking if we came inside,” Shownu continues smoothly. He measures them and doesn’t bother to conceal it. Taeyong would take him for a cop at a glance, or a soldier. “Are you planning on panicking?”

“We leave at ten?” Taeyong hazards with a sigh.

“That’s the plan,” Wonho grins. “Hey, do I smell coffee?”

At a quarter past ten a long black van screeches around the corner and rumbles crookedly up the road. Its front fender is badly dented. One tire bumps up over the curb in front of the house as it comes to a halt.

Jooheon rocks back on his heels and flits a glance to Shownu. “You don’t think they let him drive?”

A boy with a mop of grass green hair pops up over the driver’s side and waves across the roof to them.

Just behind him, Johnny’s startled breath stabs the air. When Taeyong looks, he’s squeezing Yuta’s wrist with white knuckles.

“I heard you like knives,” Shownu says. He must be addressing Ten but he watches Taeyong’s face. “I’m going to frisk you all now. Okay?” And he does. Ten rolls his eyes but holds his arms straight out.

“You think I need a weapon?” Taeyong wonders as hands smooth over his ribs, then his spine, patting from his ankle up to his knee.

“I’ve seen stranger things,” Shownu answers with his opaque calm. “And I’ve handled more vamps than you. Just so we’re clear? If I shoot you in the head you aren’t running anywhere fast. So chill.”

The vampire with a young man’s face careens up from the car. His eyes dart across them all but fall unerringly to Ten’s right wrist where the band of thistles resides.

“Hit a car,” he babbles easily, “It’s all good, did some of the woo-woo and nobody remembers us, I think. Jisung did it, too, and the guy might think he’s the President of Candyland now but hey we’re here.”

“You’re driving?” Jooheon asks with no small amount of strain.

“Fleet’s busy,” he shrugs. “You know how it is.”

The passenger door opens and a reedy vampire glides up the ragged lawn to meet them without seeming to stir the grass.

“Chenle, we’re running late,” he says, and his voice is like a deep well.

“Maybe somebody else could drive,” Jooheon is muttering to no one.

“Hey, it’s fine, it’s just like riding a horse.” Chenle tosses the keys so high they vanish from sight and catches them in one hand without looking.

“You ride horses?” Shownu asks politely. He’s tapping something into a phone with his thumbs.

“No, why?”

The one who must be Jisung stares at Johnny. His features are soft and curious. “It’s good to see you again. We were worried about you.”

“Worried?” Johnny chokes. Taeyong steps back and peels his clenched hand from Yuta’s reddening wrist before he can snap bone. Yuta breathes out heavily between his teeth. He never uttered a sound of pain.

“For what it’s worth, we all thought you were brave,” Jisung tells him, as if they were alone.

 

 

The van cuts through shrieking horns until the vastness of the lake spills into view to the east. Jooheon claws at the dash and barks panicked instructions at every jolting stop and wild turn.

They drive north and keep driving. Wonho recounts a baseball game in vivid detail while Shownu nods with endless patience and watches the four of them clinging to their bench for stability.

Gulfs of space open up between houses of looming stories. For all the vastness of the estate they approach beyond the high brick fence of its perimeter, few of the many windows are illuminated.

In the sparse foyer, Taeil pulls a phone away from his ear at the sight of them. His hand is whole again. He stands under an unadorned slab of wood mounted on the wall, planks weathered like those of a ship.

“Good to see you all,” he says, quick and distracted. “Second door on the right, thank you.”

 

 

They wait in a dim, warm room with many ferns under violet lights. The sofa smells musty with age but encompasses the four of them sitting stiffly side by side. Two girls lay in a pile of cushions on the floor. The living girl is painting her nails while the vampire feeds her nectarines from a bowl and turns the pages of a magazine in front of her.

A man who looks no older than Yuta sprawls in a stiff geometric approximation of a chair in the corner, one long leg hooked over the side as he trains his attention on some game held between both hands. His hair shines pale as butter and his sweater swamps him. The room is filled with the clicking of his thumbs over the keys and the wet sound of nectarine flesh parting.

“We have an appointment,” Ten tells the girls. His heart is nearly steady and a terrible pride pricks Taeyong like a needle.

The human girl glances up, disinterested, then back to her magazine. The vampire feeds her another slice and she chases the receding fingertips with a flash of pink tongue.

The one in the chair hums sharply, squinting down at his game, and his thumbs blur over the keys. There’s no heartbeat, Taeyong finds with a jolt. He can’t reconcile it with this likeness of youth. They can’t age, but there’s an uncanny poise in vampires, the stillness Yuta fondly called _fucking creepy_ when they met. This one is so at ease in his skin, he must be freshly made. He hasn’t forgotten himself yet.

Just like Johnny, Taeyong thinks with a pang of sympathy.

The door whispers open on well-oiled hinges and Jaehyun closes it behind him. His feet are bare and his hair damp, a white shirt carelessly half-buttoned. Taeyong can feel Ten grit his teeth without looking.

Jaehyun spares them a catlike glance of indifference and sinks to the floor beside the uncomfortable chair. He pillows his head on the fledgling’s knee. His eyes fall shut. Curled in his lap, his palm still bears a dark welt.

And the vampire who must be anything but a fledgling drapes a slender hand over his nape. He stabs a few more buttons with his right thumb before clicking his tongue. The vampire on the floor bolts to her feet and takes the contraption from him and resumes playing with a fixed concentration, standing hunched between the ferns like a forgotten lamp. The human girl pouts and blows on her nails.

“I know it’s rude to keep guests waiting,” says the vampire. His chair resembles a throne now, with Jaehyun kneeling in supplication. “But I needed a break. My schedule is just choked.” His tone is careless as a mortal discussing traffic, even as he tugs the tawny hair under his hand for emphasis. Jaehyun’s lashes flutter over his cheeks.

“Catering a party is thankless work,” he continues in a drawl. He brings his leg down and as he straightens the poise comes over him, the inhuman grace. Like a dancer rendered in wire. “When did everyone get so fussy? I have two grown men whimpering for bread because they’re on this so-called keto diet, and she’s going to get the runs from all this fruit.” The girl reading the magazine wrinkles her nose. “I remember when you would eat the human you were served and say thank you.”

“Kids these days,” Yuta deadpans.

The vampire tilts his head, owlish. “Which one are you?”

Jaehyun cracks an eye where he rests. A low vibration ceases and Taeyong realizes the faint sound had been purring.

“Are you shy now? I’ll make it easy for you. My name is Sicheng. Jaehyun here you’ve met already,” he says, rubbing a knuckle into one fair cheek. Jaehyun stretches and resumes his purring. “We have the dealer, the infant, the rogue and the witch.” His opaque eyes fall to each of them in turn.

“There’s no such thing as witches,” Taeyong blinks in disbelief. Ten kicks him swiftly with the side of his sneaker.

Jaehyun has turned his face to muffle his laughter into Sicheng’s thigh. His shoulders tremble with it.

“Your education has been negligent,” the master murmurs. “Did your sire abandon you so early? You should have found another nest.”

Taeyong sets his teeth. He thinks helplessly of the blue room, its thick curtains like shrouds, sleeping tangled with limbs as heavy and unyielding as his own. “We had twenty years,” he says, throat tightening. “He died.”

“That’s sad,” sighs the vampire with the console. Her face never changes and her thumbs tap rapidly over the keys. With her solemn round eyes she looks like a painting.

“Why me?” Johnny asks hoarsely.

Sicheng regards him. “We forget ourselves, alone. It’s against nature. No one to remind you who you are, you’re not any better than an animal. And rabid animals must be executed. It’s a real downer. We’d all like to think we’ve evolved past that old-fashioned drama, wouldn’t we?”

“What do you care?” Taeyong wonders. Ten’s hand splays warm over the base of his spine.

“Murder is a crime,” he answers mildly. Taeyong doubts he includes humans. “You may have flouted our customs but we’ll make you respectable yet. Before you argue, consider that if we wanted to be feudal about this then your humans would be _my_ humans.

“So tell, me, have I been unfair to you? You stole from me. I would have let my associate clean up his own mess, but then there was the matter of you. Closing up wounds. Only the one of you. Small. Scar through your eyebrow, one of them said. And that makes you my problem at an inconvenient time.

“We’ve cleared out a dark room for you. You’ll stay for the party. You will be courteous and welcoming to my guests and demonstrate that I look after my city. We’ll celebrate your return to civilization and the mercy I’ve shown you. Then you can start repaying what you’ve stolen from me.”

Yuta raises his chin. “We can get money.”

“Stop talking,” Jaehyun murmurs, eyes thin, and Yuta’s teeth snap together. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be here.”

“And you’ve taken up enough of my time,” Sicheng says. “Stay quiet. Make yourselves comfortable. Do as you’re told. And eat well,” he adds, frowning at the bandage on Ten’s neck.

“I haven’t thanked you.” It comes out all in a rush, wavering, Johnny curling his hands tight over his knees. Even the girl looks up from her magazine, startled. “For your gift.”

Sicheng stares. Then his smile flares like a struck match, bright and genuine. “You’re very welcome.”

“Should I tell Taeil you’re done?” the human girl speaks for the first time. Her voice is soft as a child’s with a vivid accent.

“Tell him to see me in ten minutes,” Sicheng sighs. His fangs drop. “Go away, Jisung can show you the room.” He twists his slender wrist and pricks the pads of two fingers on his own teeth. The smell of the blood is swift and heady as ozone.

“Remember to mark your food if you don’t intend to share it,” he calls, laughing, as they stumble to the door. The human guards are all waiting, slouching as if at ease, as if they don’t block the avenues of the sprawling house.

When Taeyong looks back he sees Jaehyun with his cheeks hollowed and Sicheng’s fingers pressed upon his tongue as he drinks dead blood. Johnny follows his gaze. He stares, and keeps staring until Shownu steps wide of him and shuts the door.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw blood, of course, but you can peep some blindingly gorgeous cruel angles art [here](https://twitter.com/minyasih/status/1042277642534301696) and [here](https://twitter.com/minyasih/status/1044806157532098566) !!!
> 
> find me on [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)


	4. Interlude

 

Once Taeyong scaled three flights of creaking stairs in a strange city, where the voices all melded together like the hiss of waves. He crossed a threshold and his hand was held, he thinks, by the only person who knew his name. He can’t remember if it was summer or winter, if it was raining or sunny, if they had cracked the windows in the heat. He remembers sitting on the floor and drinking red wine for the first time. And maybe he thought _the rest of my life starts here_. Maybe he imagined it.

 

 

The room is dark. Ten and Yuta hesitate to follow where they can’t see. The quiet one, Jisung, finds the light. A dense rug hushes his steps, finely woven like the one Taeyong used to lay on and play his records until blood sweet breath by his ear would beckon him to _turn_ _it_ _down_ , _darling_. He parts the drapes with the back of his hand and finds the window bricked over. The wallpaper is lush and botanical, banana leaves drenched in sun. They must miss it.

This house is lived in, or something like it. They’ve been here long enough to make it a home. How naive was Taeyong to imagine he was free of nests and their politics when he left New York.

“Oh hey, sorry,” someone stutters at the door. Two vampires with young faces and cable knit sweaters. Taeyong didn’t hear their tread in the hall. They must bud here in the dark, endlessly. Taeyong envisions a field of corpse pale mushrooms stretching out into eternity.

The two of them stare raptly at Johnny. He thinks of six shadows watching in the alley, poised like vultures while Johnny bled, and he wonders which of them laughed.

Heedless of the strained hush, Jisung prods the load one of them carries. “Is that it?”

Their names are Jeno and Jaemin. As becomes apparent, they have never used the air mattress with its shrill motor, and even Jisung standing over them pronouncing his exasperated suggestions can’t seem to find the trick of it.

Ten slants a disbelieving glance over his shoulder and even Johnny loses the rigidity in his locked limbs as he watches them struggle, bickering under their breath. They look so young. No older than Ten when they died, surely. He ought to know better but his cold chest aches for them anyway. He ought to laugh. Here the four of them wait like stunned deer when they ought to fear for their lives.

How far could they run now, Taeyong wonders. Down the stairs and blindly into the night. Not home. He could dig his own grave again, rip his nails out tearing into the cold dirt.

He tells himself he wants to protect Ten, and Yuta. That they can’t be safe here. But he thinks, worse yet, that the thrashing animal panic is his own. Not since the hospital has he been so trapped.

With one foot Jisung easily nudges the carved wooden bed to make more room on the floor. The motor is loud and unceasing. They don’t look like dead things, the three of them. Their jailers. They look like the college kids in the Village, ready to roll a joint and drink cheap wine and talk about the future like an apple they could pluck from the bough and break open upon their teeth.

The vampires peer up, startled, as Yuta sidles between them and drops to examine the valve affixed to the motor.

“Whose room is this?” he asks, conversational. He does something deft with one hand and the sound of rushing air shifts. The shriveled vinyl on the floor begins to fill like a lung, slowly.

“Ours,” Jeno says. He’s staring at Johnny again, the way Jisung stared, like he’s searching, but he catches himself and ducks his head. “You ought to have Jaehyun’s room, he’s the youngest, but—”

“But he doesn’t like you much,” Jaemin shrugs. “He’s just being dramatic, we spoil him. He hardly even uses his room.”

“Taeil said you didn’t pack, we’ve got clean clothes,” Jeno adds hastily, gesturing toward the heavy and old-fashioned dresser with its curling feet “And tomorrow we’ll find something that fits you better,” he nods to Johnny, apologetic.

“Aren’t we going to be underdressed for this party of yours?” Yuta asks in every appearance of friendly curiosity. He straightens and slips his hands into his back pockets like nothing could be more ordinary than vampire house arrest.

“It’s fine, you’re all pretty,” Jaemin grins. Behind him Jisung’s eyes twitch upward as if in exasperation. “You could wear sheets and nobody would care. But Duckie can fix you up once Sicheng’s suit is finished, they keep fussing over it.”

“Sicheng doesn't _fuss_ ,” Jisung mutters. He waits until Jaemin has tugged bright-eyed Jeno away by his belt loop and their whispers drift down the hall. “Stay in the house,” he says. “We can hear you. We can smell you. Don’t do anything stupid.” When he speaks he regards only Taeyong. A good maker is a kind master, Taeyong was once told. With patience and a firm hand. What a farce that he should be one now, dragging Johnny down with him like an anchor.

Just before he closes the door, Jisung hesitates.

“You can talk to us,’ he tells Johnny, solemn. “Whatever questions you have. You can find us.”

Johnny is very still. His eyes are flat. “Thank you,” he says evenly.

“We can handle this,” Ten says once they’re alone. He cracks his knuckles the way he does before a job. “You’ve lived with vampires before. Twenty years, you said,” he adds, lifting his chin. And he had. Taeyong never lied to him about the years before they met. He never told him anything at all. Not until Sicheng forced his hand.

“They’re not how I thought they’d be,” Yuta ventures. Brisk, he unfolds a sheet and begins tugging the corners to fit the mattress on the floor. “They’re kind of sweet.” If any instincts of self-preservation were alarmed when Jaehyun ordered him silent under his glamour, he hides his nerves well. But then Yuta always has.

“That’s great,” Johnny scoffs. His mouth tightens into a hard flat line. The light overhead casts shadows down his face like a mask of himself. Taeyong has half a moment to think, oh. This is going to be bad. “We can't _leave_ butI’m sure they won’t eat you if you tell them you want to be friends.” Whatever composure he gathered around himself before seems to have fled. How much did it cost him, Taeyong wonders, to thank the ones who ended his life. Now there's only the anger left, and the fear. Taeyong's maker was better equipped to weather those early tantrums, and the grieving that followed. He wasn't human. He couldn't break.

Something passes over Yuta’s face, so tender Taeyong wishes he could look away.

“Johnny,” Yuta murmurs, soft and unsteady. “I didn’t mean it like that. Nothing could make me forget what they did to you.”

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Johnny snaps. “And if you didn’t need your fix you wouldn’t be.”

Yuta rocks back on his heels as if struck. His hand, reaching for Johnny, recoils. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Ten was finally going to get his hands on Taeyong,” Johnny says with rigid clarity. Taeyong has never seen him so livid. He towers like a pillar of stone. “And you still needed to get off. Was it worth it? You could die here.”

“You’re emotional. The change is making you unstable. Don’t take it out on him,” Taeyong cuts in when Yuta is silent, and Johnny slashes a glare towards him. The air should burn. His hands are shaking before he clenches them at his sides.

“Do you have all the answers now, Taeyong? Am I supposed to believe you care? You only did this to me so you wouldn’t have to live with yourself if I died.”

“That’s not fair,” Ten starts, shocked breathless, his hand covering Taeyong’s forearm as if without his volition. There’s a fine tremor in his palm. A soft, hollow sound catches on Johnny’s tongue.

“And you,” he breathes. “None of us would be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“Stop,” Taeyong snaps. Loud in his ears, Ten’s heart is shuddering fast, faster.

“When you sat at my bar with your fake ID and drank your shitty beer,” Johnny overrules, slow and inexorable. “When you talked to me all night and you knew I’d keep coming back, what were you thinking?”

Ten swallows so hard it sounds painful. His hand flinches away from Taeyong. “I thought you’d do anything I asked,” he says roughly, and chokes at the end.

“And you were right. I was big and dumb and easy. For you, too,” he grits out, turning on Yuta.

Who shoves him, both palms extended. Only shock forces Johnny back, hitting a bedpost, and he recovers himself with a grunt.

There’s salt on the air. Yuta gasps, the sound raw and wet and disbelieving. He jerks his chin at Johnny and he’s so fierce and delicate in his skin that Taeyong wishes, helpless, to gather him up in this moment. Take him back before he ever met them. Turn him down a different street.

Yuta gulps air. “I was _always_ there. If you’d ever bothered to pull your head out of Ten’s ass you might have seen that.” So vast in his anger, Johnny looks smaller now. His lips part and there’s no sound. Yuta cuts Taeyong off as well. “Guys, I need to talk to Johnny. Sorry,” he adds with dangerous calm, “but could you give us a minute?”

Taeyong eyes the door and thinks of watchful halls and the teeth that reside there. The hunger. He tugs Ten to the bathroom by one slack arm instead.

 

 

The bathroom is wider than Ten’s bedroom at home, the floor set in shell pale tiles no larger than silver dollars. It betrays occupation: a jar of pomade sits open, a comb beside it. A towel is crumpled in the corner and the long mirror over the sink flecked with hard water spots.

Ten’s eyes track all this, and Taeyong waits until he settles on the middle distance, staring into nothing with his jaw tight.

“He’s just scared for Yuta.” Taeyong can see his own stricken reflection past Ten’s shoulder. He wouldn’t find himself reassuring either.

“I know,” Ten says. His mouth thins and he closes his eyes. “He sounds like you. When you’re worrying about me. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

“Yuta kept his feelings close. I never knew,” Taeyong admits.

“What, you didn’t suck it out of him?” Ten leans into the counter, some dark stone like the rocks along the sea back home. His hands flex for purchase and his knuckles whiten. His smiling mouth should never twist like this, sick and unhappy. “That’s not what I mean. You know he’s right. Johnny would still be alive if he’d never met me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Taeyong says, and Ten’s eyes snap open in the mirror. “Knowing you is a privilege.” His throat is so tight he can hardly drag out the words, he spent too long choking them down. It was simple, when Ten was young, and Taeyong could say _we’re family, you won’t be alone again. I won’t let anything happen to you._

Ten goes very still. His shoulders hitch once, painfully. So does his heart.

The voices outside swell, then go quiet. Ten turns the brass tap and the water rushes white noise. Taeyong can taste his skin on the air. Just like last night, in the dark. Taeyong could smell him through his clothes. Humid with sweat and heady blood. Wanting.

Ten peels the bandage from his neck now, meeting Taeyong’s gaze in the mirror as if tugged on a hook. The wounds from his fangs are bruised dark but clean, free from infection. He unbuttons his shirt down to his sternum and there tangled in his chains and pendants are the ones he gave Taeyong. The axe, the ring, the wheel. His hands shake as he fumbles a clasp. He looks miserable.

“Come here,” Ten says.

One by one he fastens the pendants back over Taeyong’s neck. Taeyong watches his solemn eyes. The shadows casts by his lashes. The silver at his nail beds flashing as his fingers work. There are a hundred subtle colors in his skin, perfect and alive.

The chill has yet to overtake Taeyong’s body, blood still warming him from the inside out. Ten’s fingertips shouldn’t feel like white hot embers where they brush his skin. Yet heat sinks into him like sunlight, like a memory of standing on the shore with the waves at his toes, heat upon heat until the lights quake dizzily above.

“What do these do?” he asks thickly.

“Nothing, probably,” Ten mutters. He pauses and blinks his tired eyes. “You okay?”

“I am,” Taeyong marvels. He bears Ten’s burning hand against his own throat. His skin flares hot all over, hotter, too tight over his limbs, and then passes. The seething fear in his gut quiets. It ebbs out of him like the tide and he feels light with its absence. Something like the taste of cinnamon curls up from his throat and coats his tongue. “Better than that. I’m with you. Did you do something to me?” he wonders, distant and unconcerned.

Something like panic flickers over Ten’s face and he snatches his hand away.

“No,” he says too quickly. “Why?”

“Because I’m not afraid.” Easy, without force, he turns Ten in his arms. Reels him back against his chest and studies their reflections together. He’s haggard next to Ten’s glow, but he thinks their eyes are the same. Hungry.

“You’re always afraid.” Ten’s voice is unsteady but he’s warm and solid where he leans his weight into Taeyong.

“Look what I have to lose.” He hesitates and noses the bruise in Ten’s neck. Ten shudders hard against him. “Can I touch you?”

“Fuck you,” Ten chokes, and there’s no heat in it. His fist bunches in Taeyong’s shirt behind him, his shoulders tremble. “ _Please_.”

“Two years ago.” Taeyong thumbs another button and draws his fingertips over Ten’s pendants and down the seam of his chest. Up to the shallows of his clavicles. Ten is hung together with wire and defiance but his skin is soft. “We’d just offloaded some phones. You were in a good mood. Kept hanging off my arm. You wanted to see the river before dawn.”

The three headed raven on his neck blinks its many eyes once at Taeyong and is still. He recalls the reek of Jaehyun's burnt flesh in the diner and doesn't doubt what he sees.

Ten swallows a sound. In the mirror he tracks Taeyong’s hands unbuttoning his shirt until it hangs loose and open. He shakes when Taeyong follows the line of his ribs back up to his chest and traces the silver bar through his nipple.

“Do you remember?”

Ten nods, uncomprehending, his lip caught between his teeth. Swears when Taeyong’s palms engulf the vulnerable dip of his waist.

“Look at yourself,” Taeyong presses. “I want you to see.” The hectic blush seeping down his chest. The shine of his bitten mouth. Taeyong kisses his nape again. His lips buzz where they graze ink, the outstretched pinions of the raven.

“Taeyong.” He’s trying to sound sharp, but his eyes are wet. “Don’t laugh at me.” He bears Taeyong’s hands beneath his own, low on his belly. Trembling so hard, and Taeyong understands too well. The first time someone touched him like this there was blood in his mouth, his own, and still it was gentle and unsure, their hands were clumsy in earnestness.

“Never,” Taeyong hushes into the shell of his ear. Ten is a mirage with his pale hair like a snatch of sky, black pricking his roots, the dark trail Taeyong traces from his navel down.

When he opens his jeans and gentles him through his briefs Ten swallows a moan. He’s so needful the air smells thick with him, so hot and real in Taeyong’s palm. He thinks he hears Johnny notice outside, a dimming of the conversation. Good. How many times did Johnny dare leave his mark on Ten, when Taeyong could have bitten his life out in seconds.

“We were sitting by the river.” Through the fabric Ten pulses in his hand, thickening with blood. “There was so much wind I couldn’t light a cigarette and you laughed. The lights on you were all blue and orange. I thought everything that ever happened had a reason. So I could look at you then.”

Heat rolls from Ten in waves. Sweat plasters his shirt to his back and warms Taeyong’s skin. When Taeyong holds up his hand he stares, glazed and uncomprehending, then licks his palm and groans deep in his chest when he draws Taeyong’s fingertips into his mouth. His spine is rigid as he follows Taeyong’s hand in its descent, his dark eyes ravenous in the mirror. The breath in his lungs is stoppered until Taeyong wraps a hand around him, cotton distended by his knuckles, and rubs the pad of his thumb into the slit until the blood dark tip gleams wetly past the elastic band.

All Ten’s weight slumps into him but it’s nothing to bear. His breath hitches sweetly when he feels Taeyong hard against him, how much he wants him.

“Look at yourself,” Taeyong tells him again. His voice quakes. Ten thrusts unsteadily up into his hand and his taut belly clenches. He’s unravelling so quickly, so starved for this, covering Taeyong’s hand with his own and urging him faster as he pants for air.

“Two years ago. Watching you by the water, I knew." Taeyong’s voice cracks and his hand spasms. Ten bites off a whine, pushing back into the cradle of his hips. “I knew I’d never see anything more beautiful than you. The way you always are, do you see? No one can make you ashamed. You grew up like this. Stubborn. Perfect. Mine,” he adds, quieter, but Ten is watching his mouth and he gasps when he comes.

The light is so profuse here. Clear and warm and refracted from all angles until the shadows dissolve. No part of Ten is hidden from him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles and kisses the skin behind Ten’s ear. His body is roaring with sound, air and blood and his heartbeat hammering against his ribs as he trembles. “I should have been taking care of you. I shouldn’t have made you wait.”

He licks his palm clean of salt and bitterness and Ten kisses him then, with the taste still on his tongue.

The words spill out. “You’re so _loud_ ,” he presses into Ten’s mouth. “Even when you aren’t saying anything. I can’t shut you out.” _But you’ve always been sweet to me. When the world wanted  you to be a knife. The only thing holding me on this earth is you,_ he thinks he says, delirious with the heat of Ten in his arms, and Ten reels back.

“Don’t say that.” Bright, shocked. Better than anything Taeyong ever deserved to touch.

And he can’t answer what Ten might ask him next. What the world will be for him when Ten’s mortal years are gone. Maybe he’s always known. Someday, alone, he’ll find himself in a vast place like the desert, or a craggy beach, where he can feel small under a million stars. Where his ashes at dawn will mingle with the sand and trouble no one.

Before he can ask, Taeyong kneels, and the tile echoes with Ten’s shock when he takes him in his mouth, too soon. His sighs pitch up as he knots his fingers in Taeyong’s hair, rings snagging bright and painful. Every sound Taeyong can wring out on his tongue and his hands is a revelation. No one has ever touched him like this, he remembers, and it sears every other thought from his mind like a burning filament. He wanted it to be Taeyong.

Taeyong holds his hips in place and swallows him down. Exhales all the air he doesn’t need through his nose and lets his throat tighten as he moves. When Ten comes again he bites his fist and shouts, his nails raking up Taeyong’s nape.

“I won’t ever lie to you again,” Taeyong tells him, after, voice hoarse as he trails a chain of biting kisses from Ten’s hip to his twitching belly.

“I’d forgive you.” Ten drags him up by his collar and traces the shape of Taeyong’s mouth in something like wonder. “Just don’t ever leave.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much happening, get your party hats on.
> 
> If you like yelling about vampires, find me on [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> much goes on. a reread of the two previous chapters may be advisable, if not essential.

 

 

The sea he dreams is bright and warm, so clear he can see quicksilver fish darting beneath the surface. Even now he thinks this isn’t how it went. The water was brackish and cold, the sky heavy on winter mornings watching the fishing boats glide toward the horizon. Taeyong waits for his father to turn back, to see his face, but he never does. He roots himself in dry sand, safe from the lapping low tide, and thinks with distant clarity that for all he fears it now, the sea is never far from his thoughts.

When dawn cuts golden through the cloud the sands illuminate in facets of gleaming shell. The colors are delicate, beyond counting: the milky green of a new nettle leaf, birch silver, hazy dusk purple, a thousand supple shades of rose. All these and more reside in the skin Ten wears, colors Taeyong has never managed to name in his years of study. All these and more in the shadows of his eyes and the creases of his palms and the curve of his neck.

Taeyong opens his eyes and the hand hovering near his cheek jolts. Ten bites his lip and a sudden flush blooms across his face as they study each other. A single lamp glows in the corner and Taeyong can smell Yuta on the sheets. He must have slept beside them.

On the mattress pulled into the furthest corner Johnny’s broad back is impassive, his head shoved beneath his arm, just as he was before sunrise. He ought to be waking of his own accord. But Taeyong leaves him his privacy to nurse indignity and shame.

In the quiet Ten’s heartbeat is climbing dizzy and quick, his lashes dipping when he stares at Taeyong’s mouth. His exhalations smell of tea and red meat and Taeyong aches to chase the scent down with his tongue.

“You ate?” he confirms muzzily, flexing the stiffness from his hand to cup Ten’s forearm.

Something squeezed and strange passes over Ten’s face, all feline consternation. “Me and Yuta looked around a bit. Jooheon told us to stay inside, keep out of the other bedrooms, so we did. I figured out the Keurig for Shownu and he said I was a _champ_ ,” he adds, voice squeezing even higher. Taeyong doesn’t know the word but clearly it’s caught Ten somewhere strained between laughter and disbelief.

As he drags himself up against the headboard he sees Yuta poised at the foot of the bed, chin resting on his knee. He’s staring steadfastly ahead and not towards the silent corner of the room.

“You alright?” Taeyong rasps. What does it say about him that Yuta looks startled to be asked. Nothing he didn’t already know.

Yuta clears his throat. “Just, big houses. They creep me out. I used to  — I could never find my mom,” he finishes under his breath.

There’s a story there, he thinks. One he should know by now. A better man would. But Ten is warm under his hand and everything else feels hazy by comparison. Ten is chewing the inside of his cheek and Taeyong squeezes his wrist for attention.

“What else?”

A quiet huff, the tip of Ten’s tongue touching his upper lip after as he considers the question. “He asked if I was safe.”

Taeyong snorts in morbid amusement and strokes the back of his wrist, skimming the fine hairs along his arm. “In this house?”

“With you,” Ten says dryly, intent upon Taeyong’s mouth again, his pulse stuttering. He could be thinking of a kiss, or a bite. Maybe both. He recovers himself and blinks. “You’re not going to tell me we shouldn’t have gone out there alone?”

Though he waits for the fear, it never breaks over him. He sniffs once, a ghost of laughter. “What were you going to do, barricade the door? If the sun’s up the others are just as locked in as I am, and the humans — I trust you to defend yourself.”

Ten meets Yuta’s bewildered stare as if searching for confirmation that they heard the same words. “You do?”

His mind is clear and he feels the absence of his fear like a pulled tooth, like he can trace the shape of its emptiness with his tongue. There is much to be afraid of, he knows. But it’s only a half forgotten song nagging at him and he can’t be bothered to chase down the words.

He hums and squeezes Ten’s wrist again. “Why don’t you show me around?” Maybe Johnny will unclench from his misery with Yuta’s patience for company, but that’s a thin excuse. Already he wants Ten to himself again. He’ll be insatiable now, he thinks. Now that he knows how Ten kisses, warm and curious and sweetly yielding. Now that he knows how Ten looks when he comes.

 

 

 

Once the brownstone was the most lavish house Taeyong could imagine, with the brass horses over the gate and carpets so lush his feet sank into them like sand. He had never seen a piano inside a house, or a crystal chandelier. But even that house would feel tight as an embrace compared to these long echoing halls.

They move quietly, this nest of vampires with their unlined faces, but there is movement all the same. When it was just the three of them in the brownstone, not a heartbeat among them, it could go so eerily silent that Taeyong thought, in moments of stillness, he might really be dead, and his hands shook fumbling his albums from their sleeves to rend the silence. Kissing was always better. Kisses rasp. They breathe.

There are humans in the house as well. The three guards. The girl whose sweat is heady with citrus. A man he does not meet until the following night, with a dancer’s light tread. More of them, he can smell them, but they come and go freely and leave the air hushed in their wake.

The three of them, none so tall as Johnny, borrow scentless clothes worn by the dead who still walk and talk and laugh. The shirt Johnny unfolds has “Hoseok” written on the tag in permanent marker and under the detergent it smells like warm skin and cooking oil.

Doors open and close and sometimes sounds carry from very far away. A sliver of his attention minds Ten pointing out the dense trees beyond the rear of the house, beyond the border wall, facing west. There’s a reflecting pool with a statue poised at its edge and a long greenhouse girded in brick, the glass panes clouded with steam. More closely he watches Ten’s mouth and the gesticulation of his agile hands.

Distantly, beneath the house, he hears digging. In an unseen room Jaehyun complains of boredom and Taeil, strained, asks for his phone back, only for his voice to hitch as if he’s been moved, or lifted. Nearby, Shownu and Wonho are tucked away somewhere that smells softly of cat. Once, vividly, the heat shifts the air and carries a drawn out moan from Sicheng’s bedroom.

There are photographs. Bold, out in the open. Sicheng lounging proudly against a Cadillac the color of mint ice cream, with brash tail fins and chrome all over.  It’s inescapably old-fashioned, the way he wears his natty overcoat and his hair dark and slicked back, and the picture has faded with age. In another, Jaehyun leans over a cake hazy with candle flame. He looks different, not only the cut of his paisley shirt or the earring he wears. He’s still alive. Taeyong thinks, obscure but firm, that the elegant hand curled over his shoulder, the sleeve vanishing at the edge of the frame, must be Sicheng.

For years, each birthday, Taeyong baked Ten his cake. He taught himself when they had a kitchen of their own and the first try rose unevenly, the frosting had lumps, but Ten cried when he saw it with its crooked candles alight. Before his twenty-first Taeyong had been thinking double chocolate, with raspberry filling and silken ganache, something to match the red wine Ten hated but drank anyway like he had something to prove. But Ten had commented, somehow offhand and forceful at once, that he wasn’t a child and he didn’t need all that anymore.

“What are you thinking about?” Ten has halted at the foot of the stair. The front door is mockingly near and unwatched.

“Nothing,” Taeyong murmurs, then steps close to press his lips to the hinge of Ten’s jaw. Pauses for the stutter of his breath and kisses his cheek where he carries a scar from the night they met. “Everything. This.”

 

 

 

They have a fitting. Chenle and Jisung haul armloads of clothes and a cooler into a spacious parlor, its walls lined in carved wooden panels and its fireplace sealed. They wait at the door in easy slouches, like they aren’t guards. This is how Taeyong knows a human will join them. Their hosts wouldn’t trust them alone with one of their pets.

When the human arrives, Chenle calls him Duckie. Taeyong doubts he’ll take kindly to the rest of them using the nickname, however. His shoes are red with golden trinkets and he wears a silk scarf to hold back his copper hair. He would have charmed Ten under different circumstances. He smiles at his vampire helpers but sizes the rest of them up with naked disdain.

Yuta settles onto a plush sofa, all nonchalance, most likely so he can continue holding Johnny’s hand.

“We could have packed our own clothes,” Taeyong complains idly. He’s wearing white and hates it more than he thought possible. Duckie shoves his shoulder in a signal to exchange the shirt for another, indistinguishable from the first. His gaze lingers intently on the flash of Taeyong’s pendants when he buttons up the new shirt but he says nothing of them.

“They must have thought you were a flight risk if they didn’t tell you to pack. Can’t imagine why,” Duckie continues, crisp, holding up a tie and grinning with not altogether warm amusement when Taeyong bodily steps out of reach. “Oh right, I can. You stabbed Taeil.”

Ten is staying close under the guise of fingering a velvet blazer slung over the back of a sofa. Always his body is turned towards Taeyong, open and ready. Face what you’re shooting at, Taeyong taught him. He seems to be taking Duckie’s measure still, this human with no bites upon him that Taeyong can see.

“I burned Jaehyun, too,” Ten says at last, matter of fact. It sounds provoking, and it is, but Taeyong recognizes the drive behind his chatter. This they know how to do. Like staking out a corner waiting for a mark to walk past. He and Taeyong can’t speak in earnest with so many listening ears, so they signal out in the open. _I’m here, I’m ready._ Taeyong taps the outside of his thigh twice to ease Ten’s mind. _Not now._

“He probably had it coming,” Duckie bounces back easily. “But Taeil? Don’t do that again.”

“That would be stupid of me,” Ten agrees, and Duckie slants him an unimpressed look, like he’s calculating the force and velocity at which Ten’s skull would meet the corner of the mantel and spill out its bloody contents like so much ribbon. But he won’t, not least of all because Taeyong could rip his limbs from their joints and splinter his bones like matchsticks. For all they’ve threatened, the nest has done no more than turn Johnny and spook the rest of them.

When Johnny is called to be measured, the tremors in his hands show.

“I’m not going to stick you,” Duckie says wryly, sweeping behind him and taking in the breadth of his shoulders, demanding a jacket from Chenle in some shorthand that seems easily understood.

“He’s not scared of you,” Taeyong laughs, catching Yuta’s warning glance from the edge of his sight. “Not half as much as he’s afraid your friends here will eat Yuta.” Tension locks Johnny’s back, tendons rigid in his neck, but he doesn’t deny it.

“Rude,” Chenle gasps, holding out the jacket for Duckie’s inspection. “I’ve never eaten a guest in my life. Well,” he amends immediately, flashing a conspiratorial grin up at Johnny. “Not unless they asked.”

“Is that what we are, guests?” Ten wonders. He’s shifted ostensibly closer to Taeyong’s side, but the angle affords him a better view of Jisung at the door while Taeyong watches the others.

“Pain in my ass is what you are,” Duckie mutters under his breath. Jisung is suddenly at his side, garment bags balanced precariously over one arm as he offers a bottle of ginger ale still dripping from the cooler. They’re fast, Taeyong thinks in irritation, not for the first time. They feed too well.

Duckie blinks and accepts the offering, relaxing at the first sip. Though Jisung’s face never changes, there’s something quietly pleased in his bearing as he resumes his post.

“You two,” Duckie sighs at last, waiting on Johnny to button a shirt. He gestures towards Ten, and then unexpectedly to Yuta as well. “Fall in line when company’s watching. Show that you’re loyal and then everyone can relax. This is all nice and civilized, isn’t it, but it’s feeders with loose lips that bring hunters down on all of us.”

“Do you have family in town?” Chenle asks Johnny with high forced levity, redirection broad as a highway sign. It ought to sound like a threat.

“I haven’t talked to them. They don’t know,” Johnny says too quickly. His voice goes low and thick like this when he’s trying too hard to compose himself. “I won’t, I swear.”

“What?” Jisung is near again, moving so he can see Johnny’s face. He frowns with such fatherly disapproval that Taeyong begins to guess his true age. “Why shouldn’t you talk to the people who love you?”

Taeyong scoffs. "“Because he’s dead."

“Dramatic much, nosferatu?” Duckie groans. He drains half his soda and tugs a pair of belts from a hanger for comparison. “You can go away, I’m done with you.”

“I’m not wearing this,” Taeyong disagrees, picking at the white shirt. He was so afraid of these people, he recalls. But they aren't infallible. They're playing at civility and they think Taeyong will answer meekly. “What do you have in black?”

The plastic bottle creaks in Duckie’s fist and for a moment Taeyong thinks he might throw it. He exhales instead, speaks slowly as if to a child. “Sicheng doesn’t like people wearing black all over. It’s trite.”

“Does Sicheng bleach his hair at home?” Ten cuts in unexpectedly. “Of course he does. Bet he never lets his roots show either. If Taeyong can wear black how he likes, I’ll make up the difference. Always thought you’d look hot blond,” he bats his eyes at Taeyong.

Duckie consults the ceiling and pinches the bridge of his nose in defeat. “Fine. Be some Halloween store bargain bin cliche if you want. Just get out of my sight.”

 

 

 

The kitchen feels human. Tall windows let the moonlight in. During the day it must be comforting. Wonho is slicing fruit, knife flashing like a ribbon of silver. He’s nearly as quick as Ten. Shownu is washing his hands at the sink but at the sight of them he lingers. Wonho seems to catch on to this, following Taeyong’s gaze, and something exasperated passes over his face.

“Go to bed,” he laughs.

“I’m awake,” Shownu answers, mild. Taeyong can hardly fault him. He wouldn’t leave Ten alone with a strange vampire even now, not for all his sharp knives and curious tattoos. He’s right to stay. Taeyong has thought to himself, with the hot sharp clarity that Ten’s hands burned into him, how this would go. The others are too soft. If it were forced, Taeyong would go after Jaehyun first. Rip out his tongue. He could kill him, or not, so long as he couldn’t speak. It would happen so quickly. Shownu next. Wonho is physically imposing, like an ox, but he smiles too readily. Shownu knows how to pull a trigger. Taeyong recognizes the look. The two of them first, he thinks. Ten has seen him with blood on his hands before, despite his best efforts. The thought used to trouble him so that he could hardly stand it.

There’s no joy in it. He hates the wet snap of bone. But if they wanted him docile they should have let Ten go.

“Here,” Wonho says, and brings Taeyong back to himself. He’s pushing a broad shallow bowl across the counter to Ten. Behind him, Shownu is watching Taeyong. There’s a hard line between his brows. Taeyong smiles with all his teeth and a scowl answers him.

The bowl is full of green goop topped with chunks of fruit and Ten stares down at it like it was scraped from the kitchen drain. “What. Is this.”

“Oh, none of that sugary processed crap,” Wonho assures him with a twinkle that Taeyong takes for willful misunderstanding. “Just spinach, kale, avocado, banana, cherries, some spirulina—”

“That is not a real word,” Ten pleads.

“It’s good for you,” Wonho insists primly, nudging the bowl closer.

Shownu snorts, helpless amusement creasing his eyes and breaking up his stern expression. “It’s algae.”

“It has iron. And vitamins,” Wonho rolls his eyes when Ten recoils up into his chair like a cat. “And you’re not getting any steak until you finish it,” he adds with a loose gesture to the raw meat arrayed on a cutting board beside the sink.

While Ten groans and scrapes his spoon and appeals to Taeyong for intervention, a cluster of chattering vampires drifts in. There are scraps of cloth tied around their necks, purpose clear as the clean skin of their lower faces meets their dusty brows.

“What are you doing down there?” Taeyong asks.

Jeno smiles all pleasantly opaque and unhelpful. “Digging.”

“You’re cute,” Wonho says later, when the others have left, and Taeyong realizes he’s been staring as Ten groans with pleasure over his meat, still red where his knife cleaves the center. At some point Shownu has begun to nod off in his chair, chin propped in one hand as his eyes go heavy. “How long have you two been together?”

“Days,” Taeyong answers, even as Ten mumbles _years_ with his mouth full. And Ten colors, but he doesn’t lower his head. He holds Taeyong’s eyes until Taeyong reaches out and thumbs the arch of his cheek in concession.

“Are you looking forward to the party?” Ten asks, and Wonho allows it, as if drawing a curtain over the moment and leaving them to it.

“It’s my first, so that’s exciting. Did you miss any, before?” he asks Taeyong carefully. “They’ll want to know.”

Taeyong frowns. “Miss any what?”

“The census.” Shownu’s eyes are clear, any grogginess vanished as he sits up straight. His reflexes are irksome. But still it would be Jaehyun first, Taeyong thinks. Jaehyun who can say _stop breathing_ , and smile.

“I don’t know about any census.”

“When did you die?” Shownu squints at him, and Wonho slaps his shoulder so hard he winces and rubs the spot.

Taeyong shrugs. “About fifty years ago, I think.” Counting the years has a way of pressing upon his temples like a vise. It brings memories tumbling like shuffled cards, more than he can hold in his hands, the sounds and smells and tastes merging together. Vodka and grapefruit juice on his tongue and a hand on the back of his neck in the softest leather he’d ever felt. The antiseptic of the hospital, the incoherent voices droning on the PA system and waking him from queasy snatches of sleep. The roar of fire pulling a house down. The way the sun set over the ravine, the way his heart was pounding in his ears and a shaking hand closed over his own.

“You should have been counted,” Wonho frets, as if apologizing. “Your maker should have taken care of you.”

“Don’t talk about him like you knew him,” Taeyong snaps, sharp enough that Shownu’s spine stiffens. Out of his sight, he can hear when Ten stops chewing. “He didn’t like socializing with other vampires. Can you blame him?”

After a beat of silence Shownu steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “What does that make you, then?”

And Ten is tugging Taeyong back by his shirt, weaving their fingers together and holding him fast.

“Mine,” he says proudly, and leads him from the room.

 

 

 

Some things Ten can hear on his own, like the digging. The snorts of laughter when the girl with the nectarines is scrubbing baseboards and high above her vampire companion skitters along the edge of the ceiling collecting cobwebs and singing down to her.

But Ten can’t see the distant, wavering reflection in the hall mirror when Jungwoo is in Sicheng’s study. How he’s blotchy with tears and frustration, begging for what he’s owed, how he says he doesn't want _money_ . When Jaehyun laughs at him, cold and clear, Taeyong recognizes the sound at last from the alley. Taeil touches Jungwoo’s shoulder and calls him _dear_ again, like he did at the diner, but then Jaehyun leans out into the hall and bares his teeth at Taeyong before closing the door.

Ten asks what kept him, but when Taeyong turns him into a corner and kisses his mouth red he forgets to ask again.

Another night, and another. The digging in the basement ceases. Johnny isn’t sulking anymore, but he winces when he meets their eyes, bows his head when Yuta strokes his hair. Once, when Chenle is polishing the banisters of the grand stair and complaining, Jisung answering in toneless grunts, he spies Johnny smiling as he listens, something wistful and small.

“Silent alarms,” Ten says under his breath after a disgruntled Shownu, shirtless and hair askew, has latched the bathroom window they cracked and stormed away. How long did it take him to get a hand on his gun and barrel through the door, thirty seconds, or even less? The air is still thick with the smell of the lavender concoction in Taeyong’s hair, but it doesn’t burn like the peroxide he used to cut with Sweet‘n Low so long ago.

It wasn’t an earnest effort, but clearly Ten is frustrated with the obstacle all the same. Thinking what Taeyong is thinking: we need a plan. We need a weak point. In answer Taeyong taps the inside of Ten’s arm, tilts his chin up for a kiss that Ten obliges, tilting carefully to avoid the noxious bleaching mixture.

 _We’ll wait_ , he murmurs into Ten’s mouth. He watches the raven and its many eyes inked into his skin, after, but they make no sign.

 

 

 

The night before the party he wakes to stillness, to the drumming of rain upon the roof and the gutters, so hard that it obscures all distant sounds of the house.

When he opens his eyes he finds Johnny watching him from the floor, and the hush thickens between them. Taeyong wonders if he should make empty promises now. That this will get easier. That he will hate what he’s become less in time. He was always a terrible liar, better at fleeing the scene. All those years ago he couldn’t say _everything’s fine_ when what echoed in his head was _I’m dying_ and _I’m so scared_ and _I would have kissed you more, if I knew we’d have so little time. I would have kissed you every day._

But Ten saves him, just like he always saves him. Barrels in smelling of sweet tea and the almond oil he rubs into his cuticles while he waits for Taeyong to fall asleep, impatient to explore the house. He cards his fingers through Taeyong’s ashen pale hair until the night deepens and his joints ease their rigidity, then beckons him away. He takes the halls quickly, unerring, and Taeyong doesn’t doubt he could draw the floorplan of the house now from memory.

“There are so many translations,” Ten says of the library, a long spindly ladder transversing the distance between the lower shelves with their uniform volumes and the balcony encircling the room, the upper cases fronted in glass shielding yellowed and peeling books. “I think they’re pretty new, down here. They read like diaries.”

“They want to remember,” Taeyong observes sourly. The bindings are fresh, if dusty, a muted indigo blue with incomprehensible numbers and letters stamped low on the spine.

Ten opens his mouth, then pauses. He glances up, where the rain is crashing upon the roof, and taps his ear meaningfully.

“You can talk,” Taeyong laughs. At the sound Ten jolts in his skin. It must have grown unfamiliar, Taeyong thinks, when he was stewing in his guilt these past months. He’ll make it up to him now. He’ll laugh when this house burns, if it sets Ten at ease. “I can’t hear anything past the hall, not clearly.”

“They’re old,” Ten says in a rush, hand splaying over his own throat as if to hold in the words bubbling up in eagerness. “Taeyong, they’re so old. They talk about a fire, and I think— I think it was _the_ fire. The Great Fire, _here,_ in the city,” he presses in the face of Taeyong’s blank incomprehension. “It read like hunters were after them, and then the fire spread.”

“Shame they couldn’t finish the job,” Taeyong murmurs. “Would have saved us all this trouble.”

Tracing a spine upon the shelf, Ten appears unsure. “They’ve seen so much. They talk about plagues, and ships, and _dynasties_. Come here,” he says suddenly, eyes gone keen and round.

In the corner a heavy globe catches the light on its pedestal, winding rivers and the borders of continents picked out in gold. Ten traces its circumference and unfastens a minute latch. The interior of the globe is molded to the shape of its contents, dark velvet snug against a glass case.

Inside the case is a skull, bleached and clean of flesh. A starburst puncture has staved in one temple, but the mouth is worse, half the jaw smashed away. A single fang remains.

“I found it this morning,” Ten is saying.

Taeyong grunts and tilts his head critically. “Any idea who this used to be?”

“Not from the books, I’ve only flipped through like, a fraction of them and they’re kind of hard to follow. Someone they lost, don’t you think?” Of course he wouldn’t have had time. The days and nights have gone crooked in this house. It feels as if months have passed, every moment with Ten now so golden and heavy with meaning. Already Taeyong’s hands are burning again for the worship of his skin, already he feels starved for the sight of him.

“Could be,” Taeyong shrugs, indifferent to some relic of what was already dead when he can taste Ten’s heat on the air. He closes the globe. “Could be a trophy. Doesn’t matter to us. Anything you read tell you why Jaehyun can do what he does?”

“Nothing here is that recent, not if he’s as young as you are.” Ten’s mouth twists, considering. “But you’re already thinking what I am, right? There’s limits to his mind control bullshit. It must not last too long when he’s not around, or he could’ve ordered me and Yuta not to set foot outside as soon as we got here.”

“And without a tongue he won’t be any different from the rest,” Taeyong agrees. Something queasy moves over Ten’s face, but that’s alright. Taeyong won’t make him watch, if they can avoid it. “What’s that, then?” Taeyong redirects him to an open book perched on a reading table between two armchairs, its vividly printed dust jacket so unlike the identical canvas volumes on the shelves.

“Oh, that’s weird,” Ten’s voice swerves high and unconvincing. “Guess someone was reading the latest Zhang novel.” He darts over and snaps it shut, quick, his ears reddening.

“What’s it about?” Taeyong presses, warming to the tease. They’ll be fine, and he was afraid for nothing. Johnny may never be the same again, but not Ten; Sicheng and his den of dutiful monsters can’t ruin him.

Ten makes a show of looking over the back of the book while he holds it half obscured in the crook of his arm. “A doctor moves to a small town with a lot of, um, birds,” he hastily adds.

“And then what?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing happens,” Ten answers tartly.

“You’re sure about that?” Taeyong wonders. Even now he can see Ten twitching not to laugh, knowing he’s caught. He makes a show of squinting to read the fine print not hidden by his arm. “That bit on the back says it’s the passionate, blood-soaked romance of our time. You’d expect it to be a little more eventful.”

“You’re so fucking annoying,” Ten gasps, and hurls the book at his head. Taeyong claps it from the air and studies the cover with exaggerated interest, the shadow of a looming manor held inside a fanged maw.

What more he might say is cut short as Ten knocks into him, nudges close, his teeth parting for the swipe of his tongue over Taeyong’s mouth, chased by a kiss that lingers.

“I just remembered that I could,” Ten admits, lashes dipping in something like shyness even as his deft hands curl over Taeyong’s shoulders. Even here, even now, his happiness makes him glow. Bottled sunlight, Taeyong thinks with absent, idiot fondness. They way he’d light up when he gave Taeyong his Christmas presents weeks early, and perched on the corner of the sofa with his bare feet tucked beneath him waiting for Taeyong to open them. Just like this, grinning no matter how he tries to compose himself, his heart racing with eagerness. “There were so many times I wanted to kiss you,” he says. “But I couldn’t. I wanted to lay all over you and keep you warm but I knew you wouldn’t let me.”

“You have terrible taste,” Taeyong nods gravely. His eyes are stinging but if he lets himself cry for the wonder of it all he’ll be a mess of blood. He drops the book and skates his palm down Ten’s spine to the small of his back. Noses the soft skin beneath his ear where he still smells of soap. “When we get out of here,” he begins, then halts. He’s never said it aloud, not in these fragile nights since he gave Ten the truth. That he would make himself a tool for Ten’s moans, his sighs, and beg for the privilege. That his hands are for Ten, and his mouth, his throat, his cock, the innermost confines of his body to be rearranged at Ten’s will.

He knows Ten has kept toys hidden at home, these past years. More than once when the hold of daylight was too shallow, he’d hear him, locked in his body and unable to shut out the sounds drifting down the hall. A gasp, a ragged breath, a faint electric hum that twisted Taeyong’s guts up like a nightmare. He thought then that Ten had found other company, that he wanted to be ready. Now he wants to plead, _use me_. Claw your nails down my back and tell me how to fill you up, tell me what you want to learn.

The silence is long, Ten’s eyes darkening with it. “When we get out of here,” he agrees hoarsely. He bites Taeyong’s lip, hard. “Tell me you think about me,” he orders, skin like a banked fire where he presses up into Taeyong, the metal bars through his chest a taunt.

“Always,” Taeyong sighs into his mouth.

“Tell me you want me,” he urges, scraping his blunt teeth over Taeyong’s jaw. His hands are kneading roughly over his shoulders, his biceps, never settling.

“I want to be _inside_ you,” Taeyong mutters, helpless, palms finding bare skin under Ten’s shirt, and he feels him shudder, one hand clawing into Taeyong’s pale new hair.

“Tell me you love me,” he breathes, and Taeyong hauls him into the shelves, cradling the back of his skull protectively, and kisses him until their chins are slick with it.

“I loved you when you were my brother,” he says, and Ten goes still, listening warily. “When you made me a person again. You made me better than myself. You taught me more about how to love someone than anybody I’ve ever known.”

“You always get so serious,” Ten complains, but his voice is thick and his trigger finger is light on Taeyong’s face, tracing the scar beneath his eye. “I wish I had one of the these books for you. I wish I knew everything.”

Taeyong snorts and drops a kiss into his palm. “Not much worth remembering. Not before you.”

A shame he isn’t better at math, he thinks. He should be counting the minutes unspooling into days and years. He should take every kiss and press it into wax. How much time can he hope for, he wonders. Maybe six decades, if Ten’s health is good. And if not, if not, if not. His alarm is distant, curiously muted like all his fears since the raven’s bright eyes regarded him and Ten laid on his scorching hands. Cancer could bud from a single cell, he thinks, and make its home in Ten’s marrow, his lungs. He ought to bash his own fangs in with a brick before that day ever comes and tests him.

“Are you sure?” Ten wonders. The corners of his eyes are pinched with uncertainty. “I used to think you never talked about your maker because you hated him. That maybe you’d escaped him or something. But now I think you’d still be with him if he hadn’t died.” He bites his cheek. “Did you love him?”

“No one would make it that far in the story,” Taeyong demurs. He mouths softly at Ten’s neck to feel him shiver. “People usually start with their childhood, don’t they? And mine was dull stuff. Breaking up clusters of oysters at low tide, after the fishing boats sailed out in the mornings, I remember that. We had chisels, hammers, spades, whatever we could get our hands on. I knew a kid who lost a toe that way,” Taeyong muses, though now he’s not so sure. Maybe it was a finger. “We’d eat them raw some days. You work your knife between the lips,” he instructs, thumb tracing Ten’s only to meet the hot flicker of his tongue, “and you carve the muscle away from the shell.” He drags his fingertips from Ten’s chin to his chest for emphasis, down his sternum, down to where his belly clenches tight. Ten has already lost the thread of his question, he thinks, too stunned by the unprecedented outpouring of information.

“But that was before we moved away,” Taeyong continues. “My mother worked in the factory. We were hungrier, after that. You can’t just dig up food in the city when you’ve had nothing but rice for days. I got better at stealing it. But I wouldn’t want to fill up a book with my misspent youth, either, running with that idiot gang. What?” he asks, mild, as Ten’s face registers his disbelief. “Did you think I learned how to shoot _after_ I died?” He thinks of the ravine, then, the haze before sunset and the blood pouring down his cheek, but when he presses into the heat of Ten’s mouth the memory fades. “Worked the docks in Hong Kong, later, until I could get hired onto a cargo ship. And here I am.”

“You can’t even _swim_ ,” Ten blurts.

“Did I ever say that?” He grins when Ten punches his shoulder, the impact of his rings stinging in the best way.

“Stop looking so smug. All you’re proving is that you’ve been psychotically withholding for as long as I’ve known you, and there’s no prize for that,” Ten mutters.

As lean and pliant as he is, it’s easy for Taeyong to hitch him up onto his hips. Ten’s legs cross and cling  and Taeyong braces a palm along his spine to take the weight from his shoulders pressing up into the shelves.

“What I’m saying,” he nuzzles into Ten’s burning cheek, “is that my life started when I met you. The rest doesn’t matter.” He lips at the shell of Ten’s ear with its glimmering silver, the soft skin below where his pulse races hot. His ankles lock behind Taeyong and he uses the leverage to roll up against him in urgent complaint.

“Are you going to ask permission every time?” Ten pants, breathless with impatience as Taeyong sucks a bruise over his collarbone.

“Every time,” Taeyong agrees darkly. “Always.”

And when Ten says _come on_ and _please_ he bites down, feels him groan like it echoes from his own chest. Ten is pushing himself down into Taeyong’s hips, grinding up in hard tight circles against his belly, muscles rigid inside his clothes. He chokes down a sharp wanting sound when Taeyong loops an unyielding arm around his waist so that his desperate bucking doesn’t rip his throat open under Taeyong’s fangs.

There’s no fear in his blood, no animal bitterness. No one is watching. No one is forcing their hands. He plummets into Taeyong’s belly and engulfs him in heat. His eyes are burning, his fingertips, and Ten is a quaking wreck in his arms, sweat at his temples, sucking the taste of his blood from Taeyong’s tongue when he kisses him.

“Oh,” someone sighs. “It’s you.”

There’s a man at the door. One who died in his middle years, with his shirtsleeves pinned up and a feather duster hanging innocuously from one hand. He huffs irritably when Taeyong bares his reddened teeth and shields Ten from view with his body. Ten is already back on his feet, sucking in steadying breaths.

“Jisung said we’d be out of the way in here,” Ten lies readily, past Taeyong’s shoulder.

“I don’t care where you feed,” the man rolls his eyes. “But the shelves need dusting. Shoo.”

“How does Sicheng get you all to play his maids?” Taeyong asks, covering as Ten adjusts himself in his jeans, breath hitching uncomfortably. “Is this how you pictured living forever?”

“I wouldn’t expect someone with no pride in his home to understand,” the vampire says dryly. “Some of us have been with him since the old country. We’ve been more family to him than that useless brother of his ever was. While you were living like a wild animal until we corrected your circumstances. You should thank Taeil, you know. He argued for leniency.”

“Leniency?” Taeyong repeats tightly. The wallpaper at home is still streaked with Johnny’s blood.

“In the old days, we would have cut your head off,” the man smiles thinly.

“You must be Renjun,” Ten cuts in, snatching Taeyong by the back of his shirt in warning. “Wonho said you can speak nine languages.”

“Only five with any fluency,” Renjun corrects, but the quirk of his mouth seems to accept the appeasement. “And not for your entertainment.”

“Sicheng must enjoy having such well trained pets,” Taeyong adds, conversational, and Ten yanks his shirt harder. This never used to be the way. Ten would run his mouth, and Taeyong would mind him. Taeyong would tell him, _we aren’t murderers_ , and care enough to mean it.

“Do you think loyalty is something to be ashamed of?” Renjun scoffs. He tilts his head, considering. “You’re thicker than I thought. You really don’t know who he is, do you?”

Taeyong angles his head back, mirroring him. “Why, is he famous? I didn’t think to ask for his autograph.”

“Sicheng is the magistrate of Chicago, you idiot child,” Renjun begins, appalled, but a sound cuts through the drum of the rain. He glances back over his shoulder and this time Taeyong can hear it clearly, the low chime of the doorbell carrying up the hall.

They reach the stairs, despite Renjun’s distracted muttering for them to get away, just as Taeil strides harriedly into the foyer. Shownu shuffles up on his heels a moment after, his shirt inside out as if snatched in haste.

“Jisung should be meeting the florist at the south gate,” Taeil is saying, but he trails off as Renjun opens the door.

Four men are waiting under the shelter of the porch, rain sluicing from their black coats to puddle at their feet. One of them grins, teeth swallowing up his narrow face, and pushes gamely past Renjun into the house.

“Hyungwon,” Taeil addresses one of the men outside, tight and displeased.. “You’re early.”

“Do you want them to wait outside ‘til tomorrow?” The man who barged in is flapping the rain from his coat and looking about in interest. “Get all crispy like? That’s not very friendly.”

“Please come in,” Shownu says, crisp and clear, and there’s far more tension in his shoulders than Taeyong sees in either Renjun or Taeil.

The tall man, Hyungwon, steps over the threshold first. Something darkens in his expression as he and Shownu regard each other.

“Hunter,” he says thinly, and the two vampires following behind him exchange long-suffering glances.

Wonho bolts up from the hall and at the sight of him Hyungwon’s face softens, a smile reaching his cold eyes.

“Hoseok.”

“You’re early!” Wonho beams, clattering into him with an embrace that the stiff vampire accepts.

The thin little smile remains even after Wonho withdraws, but Taeyong doesn’t miss how the other vampires sniff out the fresh blood on the air, their eyes falling unerringly to Ten. Taeyong pulls him into his side and Ten lets him, raptly watching the conversation unfold.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” Hyungwon is saying, allowing Wonho to poke and prod him from his wet coat. “I had to travel.”

“You missed the last three,” Wonho corrects him, still grinning. “And you need to use our working names for the party, Hyunwoo is real worried about it. So it’s Shownu for him, and Wonho for me.”

Hyungwon blinks, his lips parting. He seems inexplicably pleased. “That sounds familiar.”

“Sure it does. It sounds a little like you,” Wonho beams back.

Ten gasps beside Taeyong’s ear, sudden and amazed. He can’t imagine why until he follows his gaze.

The man who required no invitation, the man Taeyong took for human, has tucked his hat under one arm and is shaking out his black hair. And from his temples, from naked skin, short horns like a goat’s curve back toward the crown of his skull.

A low hiss slices the air, the master of the house so silent on his bare feet that Taeyong never hears him approach.

“Did you bring a demon into my home?” Sicheng calls down, dangerously mild. He leans upon the railing from the second floor and his fine champagne dressing gown does nothing to hide the slow seep of blood from his chest. His disheveled hair is ink black now, Taeyong observes, distant with disbelief as that single impossible word still rings on the air. “I’d ask if this were some kind of joke, but you wouldn’t know one if it crawled in your ear and died.” Jaehyun sulks up behind him in satin trousers and nothing else.

“There’s no such thing as demons,” Taeyong says, or tries to say, but his lips scarcely move.

“Minhyuk is my guest,” Hyungwon shrugs, unmoved. “And by every law of hospitality you will accept him.”

“I love parties,” Minhyuk snickers, and then Taeyong is staring at a puff of blue smoke, and a voice is close to his ear. “And with such interesting people. You smell charmed,” he murmurs delightedly, and when Taeyong snaps his head to meet him their noses brush. “Are you charmed?”

Unthinking, Taeyong shoves him away, and the demon who can’t possibly be a demon squeaks in offense and bounds down the stairs.

“And you,” he bounces up to Shownu. His teeth look sharper when he grins. “You’re such meaty boys. Hyungwon didn’t say there was so _much_ of you,” he pats the guard’s broad chest appreciatively.

“Please don’t grope my husband,” Wonho interjects brightly. “I am so excited to meet you and I’m sure you’re great, but if you touch him again I’ll break your hand.”

One of the vampires loitering behind Hyungwon mutters into the ear of the other, something Taeyong can’t catch over the rain, and he sighs.

“Changkyun wants to know if there’s anybody to eat around here,” he calls, toneless.

And Taeyong hears little else, Sicheng gliding past him and Ten like they were furniture, before Renjun turns up the stairs and herds them back to their room. Yuta chokes and shoves Johnny away from where he kneels between his legs at the edge of the bed, one foot flailing and catching Johnny in the shoulder as he scrambles to pull up his jeans.

“There’s a demon downstairs,” Ten announces in ghastly awe, and repeats himself when they don’t understand.

 

 

“I want to _eat_ you,” Ten glowers down at Taeyong’s chest, bare beneath the black vest and jacket Duckie pettily assigned him. The pendants are warm against his skin from how much Ten has touched them. It’s difficult to scold him to keep his mind clear for the night ahead, when he’s ravenous for the sight of Ten as well, his shirt gauzy and insubstantial beneath the coat that fits him so well, a stormy sea blue that twists up something strange in Taeyong’s chest.

“So,” Yuta says, eyes wide and alert as he watches the door waiting for the knock that will summon them. He fiddles with his cuffs, the closest Taeyong has seen him to nervous since they arrived. The rain is loud and Taeyong can hear no guests downstairs, no chatter. “If it absolutely comes to it. If we need to bolt. What’s the word?”

And Taeyong murmurs it into his ear, lets him repeat it softly for Johnny, turns his back so they can kiss. He traces the band of thistles inked over Ten’s wrist. And at midnight Jaemin comes for them.

 

 

There are no candles, Taeyong notices first as they descend the stair, eyes aching with the number of faces beyond the foyer, all the rooms thrown open to accommodate them. No candles, not one source of open flame, but electric tealights and pillars clustered between the endless swarms of white flowers that thicken the air with scent.

“Oh, do you get a babysitter too?” Minhyuk asks brightly as they’re deposited with him and Jaehyun’s flat, irritable glare for company. “I kind of like it. Makes me feel important.” Taeyong can’t stop staring at his horns. It’s some cold comfort that more than one vampire seems transfixed as well.

The girl with the nectarines smiles and chatters and wears a backless dress, her wrists and throat invitingly bare, but never strays too far from her vampire playing the cello in a corner. There are so many dead things milling among the wide open rooms that Taeyong’s stomach sinks with misgiving. More than Taeyong imagined could be in all the world. Filling up the corners, clustered along the walls, a sea of waxen faces stretching out of sight along all the halls and open spaces of the first floor like the chambers of a heart.

It’s true, like Sicheng warned him; none of them are alone. A tall woman wreathed in a cluster of doe-eyed girls both dead and living like some unholy constellation smiles at everyone she sees, but never speaks. Five vampires Taeyong takes for sisters wear their black hair long and straight, their red dresses identical, but as he listens to Minhyuk’s incomprehensible rambling on the marvel of pigeons with one ear he sees that their features are not so similar, the heels of their shoes different heights to lend them the illusion of mirror images.

Two vampires, a man and a woman, are tucked up on a sofa on either side of a rangy human with powerful shoulders, and they take turns sipping from his neck and kissing his slack, grinning mouth. Another pair dances in the corner, far too sprightly for the low singing of the cello. The smaller of the two men dips his graceful partner and laughs into his throat, then reels him back up into his arms as if he weighs nothing.

“You don’t need to learn any bad habits from Taemin,” Jaehyun frowns, following his eyes. “He’s the dangerous sort. A monogamist,” he pronounces with disdain at Minhyuk’s interested look.

“Jongin seems happy enough,” Minhyuk supplies, then bats his eyes at the scowl that answers him. “What? I introduced myself to some of these pretty people while you were sucking your sugar daddy off upstairs. Now you’d better turn that frown upside down before he gets here,” he adds, grin widening in the face of Jaehyun’s venomous glare. “You’re not so pretty like this, are you honeybunch?”

Ten coughs and covers his twitching mouth. Jaehyun looks irate as a wet cat but surrounded by guests he can only sneer and lace his hands tightly behind his back.

“So you’re a demon,” Ten supplies, curiosity bursting through his attempt at nonchalance. “What’s that like?”

“Pretty great,” Minhyuk says. When he moves the fine gold chains he’s looped up his horns catch the light. “Hyungwon buys me all the french fries I want, I get to drive the hearse while they snooze, and if anybody tries to, you know,” he mimes stabbing himself in the chest. Staking, Taeyong thinks uneasily. “I get to eat them. No evidence,” he assures them. “I’m tidy with my food.”

“Are you one of the fledglings?” A woman nearby is asking Johnny, and when he murmurs a bashful confirmation she jerks him down by the ears and kisses his forehead, leaving a smear of her red lipstick behind. Yuta waits until she twists back into the throng to shake out the plum handkerchief from his pocket and dab Johnny clean.

Past them he can see Shownu and Wonho at their post, minding the doors from the mouth of the grand staircase and granting their permission to enter as more guests arrive while keeping the adjoining rooms in their line of sight. Hyungwon loiters near, something indulgent in the dip of his head as he listens to Wonho talk animatedly with broad gestures.

“Oh,” Minhyuk exclaims, delighted. “I know something you don’t know. Give me a button,” he says, snapping his fingers, and Ten complies in a daze, biting one from the cuff of his blazer. Minhyuk coos over it, holding it up to the light, then drops it into his pocket.

“You’re wondering about Hyungwon and the beefsteak?” he asks, and Taeyong nods begrudgingly. Hyungwon called Shownu a hunter, and Taeyong can see it now with chill clarity. His composure, how his hands don’t waver. All the more reason Shownu wouldn’t be willing to share his husband with a vampire.

Minhyuk makes a show of tallying on his fingers. “See Hyungwon is his, how many is it, his great great great—” he pauses, frowns at his fingers, then shakes them out in frustration. “His great uncle. He’s got a billion of these little flesh bags he looks after, the whole bloodline, but he’s real partial to the kiddo over there.”

“He looks after them how?’ Ten prompts.

Minhyuk leans in, conspiratorial. “Used to be money before the whole big repression thing.”

Taeyong glances at Ten for clarification, and finds him blinking rapidly, no quick and filthy joke on his clever tongue. “Do you mean the _recession_ ,” Ten finally asks, strained, and Minhyuk snaps his fingers in confirmation.

“That’s the one. So Hyungwon’s getting the family fortunes sorted and I’m his lucky charm.”

“Among other things?” Ten guesses, and the demon grins with all his sharp teeth, touches his long tongue to the tip of his nose, and snaps a button fearlessly from Jaehyun’s coat. He cuts through the crowd like an eel only to sling an arm easily over Hyungwon’s shoulders in the foyer. And Hyungwon arches a tidy brow, his lips move, but he doesn’t dislodge Minhyuk’s hold. Taeyong recognizes the gesture, he realizes. The careless arm, the weight tucked into his side. Ten does it all the time when he’s feeling territorial.

There’s no stamp of resemblance between Wonho and the vampire who calls himself his family. Only the way Hyungwon watches him, fond. Taeyong wonders for the first time in many years if his sister is still alive. If she ever had children. He wonders if she was happy.

With the demon gone, vampires crowd in close with questions. They want to know about Taeyong, about Johnny. Where are you from, they want to ask him, who are your people. _Us_ , Ten says. _We are_ , Yuta says, and Johnny is struck quiet and overwhelmed as he’s cooed over.

“You think you don’t belong here with us,” Jaehyun says from the corner of his mouth, when the press of eager faces has drifted away and Taeyong can’t breathe over the flowers choking the air. His eyes are fastened raptly on Sicheng, tall and upright as he weaves through the rooms clasping hands, smiling glossy and remote at every guest and never laughing. “You think hating your own guts is something to be proud of and you take the mercy Sicheng has shown you for granted.”

“And you think you’ve found some kind of religion,” Taeyong snaps back.

“I would die for him,” Jaehyun agrees fervently. “You couldn’t understand that - you let your maker burn.”

There’s a distant ringing in his ears, the roar of the rain, the din of voices. The cello playing like a long drawn out cry only to halt suddenly as if choked. Taeyong can feel Ten’s hand warm in his own, hear the startled sound Johnny emits as his name is called and he withdraws from Yuta’s warmth where they’ve laid claim to a chair, blinking up at Taeil.

“Before we strike out the names of the ones we’ve lost, we have something to celebrate. Yerim, and Changkyun,” Taeil calls, louder. He smiles, all benevolence, as one of Hyungwon’s nest shuffles up in his faded black coat. One of the women in red peels away and wrings her gloved hands.

“Come meet your people,” Taeil says, and they follow him, the one he called Changkyun barking uncertain laughter as he sinks to one of three wooden chairs pulled to the center of the room. The girl follows, and Johnny after. And Sicheng is centuries younger, suddenly, when he stops before each of them in turn, in his ridiculous red magician’s coat that Ten gasped over, and leans down to kiss their foreheads.

Accepting the pocket knife Taeil offers, its handle mother of pearl, Sicheng cuts his thumb. The room is crowding close and airless, the many guests pressing in through the open doors, peering for a better view.

“Be welcome,” Sicheng says, and smears a bloody thumbprint over each of their brows.

And he hands the knife to Taeil, who repeats the action. “Be welcome,” he says so warmly, then passes the blade to Renjun and sucks his cut thumb.

Renjun presses his blood into their brows and then so does Chenle, so does Jisung, so does Jaemin, and so does Jeno. So does Jaehyun, leaving their sides at last, and the vampire who has set aside her cello to follow him. Jaemin hugs Johnny when he reaches him, brief and earnest.

 _Be welcome_ , they say. _Live long,_  they say.

The women in red giggle over Yerim, and one cries. Hyungwon drags his bleeding thumb down the bridge of Changkyun’s long nose and murmurs something into his ear that makes the fledgling’s face crumple with some restrained feeling. Their companion follows, huffing at Changkyun’s wobbling lip, only to kiss him soundly and daub his blood over his chin.

Strangers are painting Johnny’s face in their blood, dead things are holding him by the jaw and murmuring their blessings, and Johnny’s eyes are spilling over in red. He’s not afraid, Taeyong thinks sickly. He looks so hopeful it must hurt him, like his heart is breaking open, as they stroke his hair and kiss him and call him by his name.

“I need air,” Taeyong mutters, his jaw so stiff it feels wired shut. Ten makes an uncomprehending sound but he yelps and leaps after him, in the wake of Taeyong knocking through shoulders and stamping on feet to cut through the crush of bodies. Thunder rattles the windows, the rain battering down like waves.

The guards are watching, their lips are moving but Taeyong can’t hear over the waves. Ten is clutching at him but Taeyong is so much stronger, and he bears him through the hall, through the kitchen. When he bursts over the threshold and into the rain he’s brought to his knees as if punched, body wracked, retching blood into the wet grass and the mud. Something is pouring out of him as if from a severed artery, or something is pouring in, flooding him with shame like acid in his throat.

“There was salt at the door,” Ten is babbling, blotting his sleeve into the blood at Taeyong’s mouth. “Fuck, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know.”

“You took my fear away,” he says, and understands. Rain is running into his eyes, into his mouth. He wants to drown. He wants Ten to lay his hands on him again and set him on fire. “Isn’t that sick? I’m the one who made Johnny afraid but I didn’t have to feel any of it,” he chokes, and Ten is in the mud with him, trying to hear him, trying to hold him. “I did that to him, they killed him but I made him _afraid_ , I’m the one who did that to him,” and he’s saying the words, he’s shouting them, they’re losing shape in his throat and breaking on his fangs.

There’s the fall of Shownu’s boots behind him and Ten’s voice in his ear and blood is on the wet air, hot and _alive_ , and he runs blind.

They’re so far behind him, across the reflecting pool, lost in the crashing of the rain as he scrabbles for the door of the greenhouse, the glass steamed up from inside. There’s blood and so much of it, so much it burns the air, so much someone could be dying. The air is so thick, obscured with palm fronds and trailing ferns, towering cacti, blooms cascading violently red and purple, and Taeyong rounds the corner ready to break bone, break himself, break anything.

Jungwoo is limp on the ground, his back to the bricks and his legs askew like a corpse. Taeyong knows him by his hair, the pink faded but stark against the pallor of his skin, his lips gone white and gasping. One crouched vampire is drinking from the crook of his arm, the other from his neck, their heads bent intently. But his presence must register at last through the blood haze and the larger of the pair glances up.

And the screeching white noise in Taeyong’s skull goes hollow and silent. He’s staring at Lucas and his round dark eyes and his dripping red mouth and then Lucas is crashing into him, knocking him off his feet only to gather him up again, he’s saying Taeyong’s name and holding his face in his huge ridiculous hands and he’s crying, fat bloody tears welling up and streaking his handsome face.

“We looked for you,” Lucas babbles, and he can barely speak over his sobs, loud and open like a child.

Taeyong can’t move. His strings have all been cut. But he hears the soft clip of shoes on the flagstones drawing near, and shuts his eyes. Hope and fear are one animal, one helpless thing clawing inside his chest. He listens to the footsteps. They would be leather, supple to the touch, he thinks desperately. Something Italian, something chosen with care like his gloves, his clove cigarettes, his overcoats, his cologne.

Taeyong opens his eyes.

Kun doesn’t cry. His eyes are clear and he looks serene as a painted angel, but then he always did.

He curls a blood warm hand into Taeyong's cheek.

“Darling,” he sighs.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> author dispenses secrets and walks into the ocean, free of her burden (brought to you at last via saintly beta handholding)
> 
> find me obsessing over cameos in my lair on [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers) or [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)
> 
> cruel angles playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1264475943/playlist/5w6jOTTOfzUWTngYkvqIOw?si=NRTps-OJQNmxunVRaEWw-Q) if you're into that sort of thing


	6. Chapter 6

In the Village there were always newsletters and pamphlets, the sort hastily stuffed in jackets or found crushed underfoot like cigarette butts. Anti-war slogans and open mic nights in basement bars. And printed on cheap paper, not meant to last, were guides to the bathhouses and bars for men who wanted to be alone with other men. It was in the city that Taeyong saw two men kiss for the first time, out in the open. The shadows were deep blue with evening but still the pair could be seen, stumbling down the street and pausing beneath an awning when it began to rain, their heads nodding together.

He had tried not to stare, the way locals never stared at subway sermons or drunks asleep on the pavement. But until that moment, a small and frightened part of him had never believed it; that there could be more people like him in the world. Every kiss was a private thing, charged with a longing to be seen, finally. Like conversing in a language they had invented all their own. But in time he saw the pamphlets, and learned the shape of the words, and it felt childish to admit how sacred that night felt.

What could he say - _you skinned your knuckles on my teeth, and I kissed you, and I thought no one could ever understand how we felt._ But they were meant to be practicing their English, and he didn’t know the words anyway.

They never visited those clandestine bars, not even as Taeyong’s English improved and he explored on his own. He mapped the intersections near their apartment, the corner bodegas, the subway lines under 7th Avenue, the buzzing coffeehouses he passed on his way to wash dishes for a dollar and twenty-five cents an hour.

The bars came later, and he was alone. In the upscale sort where men wore their hats and overcoats from the office and the whisper of a raid would send them running, they never spoke to him. In the ones he could afford, counting out his coins, they took him for a hustler. Taeyong doubted they would laugh with him if he said he’d only kissed one man in all his life and there might never be another. Once a bartender threw him out because he didn’t like the shape of his face, and Taeyong never went back for his coat.

The bathhouses frightened him, unaccustomed to that sort of open avarice, bold hands without any tenderness. And he couldn’t stand lying awake in his makeshift bed on Neoma’s sofa while she peered from the kitchen, dark and searching, like she might think she was in love with him. Of course she did - it was why she was the only person Taeyong could ask for a place to stay. It could only get worse. She would start adding up the days he wasn’t well. When he fainted at the sinks on his shift, when he was sick in the bathroom.

Somewhere off Sixth, the floor was sticky and the glasses were dirty, the same nasal folk record playing over and over. And when two men sat on either side of Taeyong at the bar, he expected a mugging more than a gloved hand stroking the back of his neck. The second man, tall, with his arms bare under rolled sleeves despite the cold, muttered something low and amused to the first.

 _Pretty_ , he said in dialect, and Taeyong’s ears burned. He couldn’t even see the man touching his neck. He couldn’t summon up the will to care. He hadn’t been able to keep his breakfast down, or his lunch, and the shadows shifted queasily around him.

 _I don’t fuck for money_ , he forced himself to say in what crude pidgin he retained from the docks. But it was tempting. Who cared about the money. He could leave something for Neoma, to pay her back. And the man staring in stunned delight was so handsome, with slick hair and big ears and straight white teeth. How much did the boys loitering under the bridge make, he wondered. More than a buck twenty-five an hour, that was for sure.

The hand at his nape lifted, only to curl over his thigh. And the first man, taking him in, he resembled a banker as much as the second looked like James Dean by way of Hong Kong. His suit had to be the most expensive thing in the bar. When he spoke, soft and level, Taeyong leaned closer to hear him over the music.

“So what will you give us for free?” Kun asked. He didn’t blink. This Taeyong learned in time — he had either forgotten the trick of appearing human or long since stopped caring.

How inscrutable he had seemed all those years ago, with those steady eyes and his breath cool between them as Lucas knelt on a grimy bathroom floor and sucked Taeyong off with shameless ease, the wet sounds of his lips and tongue louder than Taeyong’s rasping breath. It was the eyes that kept Taeyong staring as if hypnotized until Kun pressed closer, and then the pain in his neck was fleeting hot silver.

“Oh,” Kun had said, after, cleaning the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. There was nothing Taeyong could comprehend in his face. “You’re dying.”

And Taeyong had been too tired to cry. The crying had come weeks before, biting his shirt and splashing cold water over his face at the sink, fighting to be soundless.

“Yeah,” he said numbly. “I am.”

“Would you consider an alternative?” Kun pressed his thumb upon the tender spot in Taeyong’s neck, the skin closed over whole like he was never bitten.

He didn’t say yes. That came later, in the hospital, and that night he thought Kun’s face was the kindest he had ever seen.

 

 

Lucas is still crying, smearing blood into his sleeve when he scrubs it across his face. Kun tilts his head and regards them both fondly. It’s a small expression, the configuration of his mouth and straight brows. Kun’s features are economical this way. But the language of him hasn’t left Taeyong after all, somehow intact beneath the ash.

“We’ll be talking all night,” Kun remarks. “Tell us everything.”

Taeyong’s tongue is stiff as if frozen. The taste of the old blood he retched in the grass sours his mouth.

“Why didn’t you come back?” Lucas snuffles into the back of his hand, absent accusation. Distraught, the way he sounded when he found Taeyong holding the skin of his wrist open, paring knife tossed aside in their dusty kitchen, studying the flex of his tendons and trying to summon up horror, or wonder. Anything.

Adoration, that’s how Kun looks at Lucas, if you know his tells. And it’s recognition that hardens his mouth like granite when Shownu’s wet boots tamp into view, a loathing so stark that Taeyong stills in thoughtless animal panic. How could he have deluded himself into thinking he could bring himself to kill this man, who warily holds them all in view while he kneels to staunch the bleeding at Jungwoo’s neck. He’s braver than Taeyong will ever be, defenseless when he lifts Jungwoo up against his body. Already blood creeps between his fingers.

“I know your face,” Kun says.

For a moment Shownu appears to reconsider the burden in his arms and the dead things that outnumber him. Then he hefts Jungwoo more securely, his hanging limbs motionless. “I don’t think we’ve met.” He lifts his chin. “Ten, get the door.”

“No,” Kun muses. When Taeyong twists his stiff joints he finds Ten a step behind, heartbeat clamoring, haloed in bright violent flowers hanging overhead. He holds a knife Taeyong doesn’t recognize. “But I would know you anywhere. You must be the pet hunter. You look just like your uncle did before I plucked out his eyes.”

 

 

Upstairs, the library is devoid of guests. The music plays on, the rain soft upon the roof. Their wet footprints follow them, but not Shownu — he passed Jungwoo to Jooheon in the kitchen and disappeared after him, but not before muttering something directly into Wonho’s ear. He never took his eyes off Kun.

“Is he yours?” Kun asks in interest, studying Ten’s rigid hand at Taeyong’s elbow. The band of thistles inked into his skin seems darker, and Taeyong realizes with a jolt that the very air over Ten’s wrist is hazy with heat.

“Taeyong said you burned up,” Ten answers for him, and no more.

“We did,” Kun agrees mildly. “How lucky that our Taeyong wasn’t home at the time.”

Lucas frowns and tugs Kun’s ear between his teeth in complaint, only to flop down sullenly in an armchair when he garners no reaction. His eyes are still so red, his hands sitting awkwardly atop his knees as though he would rather reach for Taeyong. Never one for subtle affections, Lucas. He was perpetually post-coital, all clinging limbs and indulgent kisses.

The colors of them sear Taeyong’s eyes. Every flash of Kun’s teeth when he speaks is like staring into white hot ember.

“Did you think it was me?” The words come numb and half-formed, without explanation. But Kun comprehends him perfectly, holding Taeyong’s gaze as he tugs on one glove and then the other. Lucas stifles a whine of distress and Kun hushes him, passing back his handkerchief to clean his bloodied face.

“I assumed you were visiting your boy again,” Kun lifts one shoulder in a shrug, even as Taeyong forgets to breathe. “But the timing didn’t escape my notice.”

From outside the doors open to admit Jaehyun and Sicheng. Renjun surveys the room from behind them, sighs, then shuts them inside and stands watch out of sight.

Now Sicheng drops his glossy politician’s smile. “You still have no impulse control.” He eyes a spot of blood on Kun’s collar. “You missed the induction, do you have no shame?”

“Not especially,” Kun murmurs, unfazed. He cups Lucas by the jaw and permits him to lip at one leather clad thumb. “But you knew he’d catch my eye, didn’t you? Jungwoo has such a yielding nature. I think I’ll keep him.”

“You haven’t even asked permission.” Jaehyun’s scorn ought to split the seams of his fine coat. He bristles beside Sicheng like a dog on a fraying leash. “You owe your elder that much respect.”

“And what does he owe me?” Kun grins like a knife, so vivid on his elegant face that Taeyong flinches, uncomprehending. His regards Sicheng with his entire body now, and his profile is so perfect, edges crisp and merciless, that Taeyong wonders for the first time if he was a fool to think Kun could die. That any fire or sharpened blade could overpower his will.

A storm darkens Sicheng’s face and he snaps something back. The shape of the language is - nothing like what Taeyong picked up on the docks and repeated clumsily to Lucas, childlike sentences strung together to make him grin. Not putonghua, not the lilt he recalls in Kun’s voice. He would think it imagined, another trick of his wavering memory, but Jaehyun glares at Lucas for an explanation, only to be answered in a shrug. Lucas flaps a hand for Taeyong to come sit beside him, frowning unhappily when he doesn’t budge, and all the while Kun and Sicheng continue in that strange and twisting tongue. Where Sicheng hisses, Kun drawls.

Then it’s Taeyong’s name hanging in the air, Sicheng lancing him with a disbelieving squint. Kun, untroubled, continues in the dialect and cuts an unerring path to the globe. He traces the golden spine of a river and walks his fingers across the expanse of Asia.

Yesterday Ten lingered over the skull inside like some relic to a nameless religion. _Someone they lost, don’t you think?_

“Then you shouldn’t have turned your nose up at the census.” Sicheng yanks down a book from a shelf, and another, pages rustling and leatherbound spines slapping upon the floor. “Where will I find his name? He was never inducted. You have no proof and his debt to me stands.”

“I’m only attending this farce as a favor to you, as well you know.” Kun rolls up each cuff in tidy creases. His veins are deep blue where they disappear beneath his gloves, as if drawn in ink. He toys with the latch of the globe and Sicheng goes silent.

“We can negotiate,” Kun continues. “I’ll let you pretend you have leverage, darling, when you keep a hunter in your house. You don’t even hide it. Tell me why I shouldn’t feed him to your precious guests, after all that family has done to me.”

“I’m capable of choosing who I employ regardless of your grudges.” Eyes on the globe, Sicheng’s temper dims. Taeyong would almost swear he were nervous.

“I’ll remember that you were certain,” Kun nods, pitched so low that the rain above them seems to hush in expectation, “when I come to gather your ashes. He’ll turn on you, they breed them that way, like dogs. It’s in the blood.”

“No, he won’t,” Ten says, and snares every pair of eyes in his net. His hair is still dripping and unlike Taeyong he feels the cold, fighting down shivers. The warning shimmer of heat from his tattoo seems not to warm him.

“He won’t,” he repeats. Of course. While Taeyong has been reeling and making sense of the impossible, how Kun and Lucas could be whole again with not a fingerprint or strand of hair out of place, their unburnt skin glossy as satin - Ten has been watching. “You go to ground in the morning, isn’t that right? That’s what they were digging under the house. If you sleep down there, with Wonho’s family, there’s nowhere safer. Shownu loves his husband, and he knows Wonho would never forgive him. It’s not complicated. It’s not even about you.”

“You’re very familiar with my staff,” Sicheng observes at last.

“It’s been so long since we had a witch for company.” Kun spins the globe idly, the motion so restrained that Taeyong never sees his hand move. “He can come with us, if you like.”

“You’re taking no one,” Sicheng snaps, one splayed hand pinning the globe in place. “Not him, not the witch. Take the feeder if you want him and good riddance.”

“Are you trying to force my hand?” Kun wonders, silken with warning. Over his blue veins, his wrists are hung in fine chains of gold. They shine like water when he moves too swiftly, reaching up to clap Sicheng by the skull. He says something low in that twisting and unfamiliar language, baring his fangs, and kisses Sicheng so hard his spine bows back with it.

When they part their lips are bleeding.

“Get out.” Sicheng doesn’t fight the hands clutching his waist. The glare he turns on Jaehyun, however, is more profound than a slap. “You heard me.”

They get out.

“Stay with Lucas,” Kun calls over his shoulder. Deft and unhurried, he plucks the buttons from Sicheng’s shirt and casts them aside in a clatter like hail. “We won’t be long.”

 

 

“So how’s it going?” Lucas asks Jaehyun brightly as they descend the stairs. Though pale and furious, he still halts obligingly and permits Lucas to kiss his cheeks. Kun, ever dignified, had a wide umbrella coordinated to match his overcoat, and likewise Lucas is damp from the rain but not drenched like Ten and Taeyong. No sooner does Ten begin to shiver in earnest than Lucas slings his jacket over him, the broad shoulders spilling over.

The sound of the cello drifts up to meet them along with distant laughter and the smell of fresh blood. Johnny spies them and approaches quickly without losing his clasp on Yuta’s hand. The blood has dried over his face, beginning to crack and flake, but there’s no sign he’s disturbed it.

“You know each other?” Johnny ventures, taking in the jacket hanging from Ten and Lucas reaching out to stroke Taeyong’s sideburn. His voice dips uncertainly, and for good reason. Taeyong could count on one hand the people he permits to touch him. He doesn’t even know half the impossibility of this moment: Lucas is here. Kun is here.

“We’re family,” Lucas beams down at him. “All of us, and Taeyong.”

 

 

He kisses Ten in the dark kitchen. Holds him and breathes in the scent of his hair and murmurs nonsense assurances. _Stay with Shownu_ , he says, as if he doesn’t know who gave Ten the knife. Before they part, Ten licks the hollow of his throat and traces a shape there with his fingertip.

“When I took your fear away,” he says, “I didn’t mean to. But I can try again, if you want.” But Taeyong shakes his head and makes himself still, inhabiting the chambers of Ten’s heart and the rise of his lungs until Taeil knocks to summon him.

The stair winds down where Taeyong has never seen. The cement floor has been split through and great mounds of earth rise alongside a single grave vast enough for every dead thing in the house. Jooheon waits at one side with a shovel, and Wonho at the other.

Kun and Lucas lay down in the dirt in their fine clothes and make a space for Taeyong between them. He hesitates, glancing back for Johnny, but Taeil has already caught him by the wrist. Jeno and Jaemin sit up hastily and shuffle to make room.

As the humans begin to turn scoops of dirt over them, Taeyong hears a woman stifle a giggle. Another complains idly of the tedium. Lucas strokes a line down Taeyong’s nose. Kun’s arm is heavy across his waist and he still smells of sex and Sicheng’s skin.

“I dreamed you,” Lucas confides. The blood on his breath makes Taeyong’s fangs ache. “I knew it had to be some kind of omen. I saw you by the sea.”

 

 

The walls of the house no longer confine them. Beside the moonlit reflecting pool, Ten and Yuta confer with Johnny. Taeyong sits cross-legged atop a sink, faucet digging into his tailbone, and keeps them in his sight through the window. The roof of his mouth still tastes of soil heavy with clay.

“How did you survive?” He holds Kun’s gloves in his lap, curled supple between his hands like some living thing. His maker’s sleeves, folded past his elbow, are quickly soaked through as he bathes Jungwoo.

Kun considers, his long fingers massaging a lather into rosy hair. Jungwoo is so docile that Taeyong would think him glamoured if not for the shine of his hooded eyes, alert to Kun’s every word and sigh.

“Slowly. Painfully.” He cradles the back of Jungwoo’s neck and guides him back down into the water until all but his face and skinny knees are submerged. “We could scarcely move, those first nights in the sewers. Smelling like filth, our skin blackened and peeling away in sheets. I couldn’t even hold Lucas without hurting him.”

The bath steams and the air smells of jasmine oil. It’s the very same, Taeyong thinks uneasily. Memories that he thought were faded beyond recognition keep swimming back up like film developing. Maybe Sicheng was right when he said dead things needed each other for this. These past weeks Taeyong finds he remembers himself too well. Better each night since Johnny, he’d swear, more and more since they came to this house.

Now Kun, and Lucas. He remembers that first night in the brownstone. When he woke cold and heavy and they stroked his spine as he retched up acid, no food left to purge after weeks on the IV. How they bathed him just like this and washed the reek of sickness away. Lucas had rubbed his feet in oil and licked his ankles as Taeyong stared dizzily at curls of vapor shimmering in the air overhead.

“You must be shocked.” Kun eases Jungwoo back up and works a gel from his neck down to his chest until it shines like milk. His entire body is turned to the task, features serene, even when he addresses Taeyong.

Taeyong’s throat tightens. “Aren’t you?”

“Little shocks me anymore.” He draws one warm flushed arm up from the water as he lathers. The bite at the crook of Jungwoo’s arm is stark. Above it, a bandage has come unstuck at the edges, its center dark with a drop of blood from the transfusion site. “But I do wonder why the hunter lied. It took us so long to find them, and we kept one for answers. He swore there was a third.”

“I slept somewhere else that day,” Taeyong swallows. “Everything was on fire when I came home.”

“Humans lie,” Kun dismisses easily. “Maybe he just wanted it to end sooner. Lucas wasn’t himself after we lost you. His grief got the better of him.”

Lucas can bend wrought iron like a party trick, Taeyong thinks uneasily. He can imagine how a human body could be broken and splintered beyond recognition.

Light glistens across Jungwoo’s dark eyes, absorbed in listening.

“You’re serious about turning him.” That earns him a narrow resentful glare at odds with all Jungwoo’s show of passivity. Something like outrage knots in Taeyong’s gut. “After one night? You don’t know him at all.”

Kun hums and turns Jungwoo as if he were no more substantial than the suds skimming the surface of the bath. Jungwoo rests a cheek on his folded arms at the edge of the tub, his wet lashes dark when he closes his eyes, and the broad unmarked expanse of his back is like an offering.

“Was my offer to you more deserving?” Kun wonders, untroubled as he massages pliant flesh. “Do you think I chose you for your virtues?”

Taeyong had thought his memory of that night was lost. Yet it’s so vivid now that clarity sears him like lightning.

“You said you thought I was beautiful.”

“And you are.” Kun regards him and his hands are still. “Now and forever. There is no higher calling than this. No meaning.”  
  
“Does Sicheng know that?” Taeyong mutters.

“He has lofty ideals,” Kun appears disturbingly fond. “And they’re his to indulge. As I am indulged.” He strokes Jungwoo’s wet hair from his brow.

“You think it matters what he is today, in his animal life,” Kun continues. “When you become a maker you’ll begin to understand. You think you know your little witch now. You smell like him. But after the change, he will reveal himself to you in volumes of color you never imagined.”

Kun doesn’t know. Whatever passed between him and Sicheng in that language all their own, he wasn’t told. Outside, as if snared by a net, Johnny looks up from the darkness and meets Taeyong’s eyes through the window while the others converse unawares. Would Kun even care, Taeyong wonders. What is death to him but simply turning out a light and walking into the next room.

A small, wet sound. Kun has pushed the corner of Jungwoo’s mouth open between thumb and forefinger to examine his teeth and pink gums, free of rot.

“Please,” Taeyong says, and the full force of Kun’s attention is like being buried in the sand. He couldn’t move if he tried. “I need your help.”

 

 

After the clamor of so many voices and the roar of rain, the house is hushed. The quiet settles like a tidal pool when the surf retreats, the surface so clear that Taeyong thinks he could see straight to the bottom, just this once, and be certain of what comes next.

The joy hasn’t come, though part of him still aches with fondness when Lucas slings him a crooked, reassuring grin over one shoulder. Once he would have begged and bargained for Kun to be made whole again, not to leave him alone in a country that never wanted him. But Ten is warm where he leans into his side in silent reassurance, and the air around him is soaked with the taste of his skin. What Taeyong once called family is as distant in comparison as a moon is from a star.

There’s not room enough in Sicheng’s study for everyone who wants to hear this. The master — the magistrate, Taeyong reminds himself — sits back against his looming desk, Jaehyun ever at his arm. Their hair is soft, their feet bare, all the polish of the census swept away with the guests. Taeyong keeps a window behind himself and Ten out of habit. Johnny and Yuta position themselves carefully at the opposite side of the room. Taeyong always told them not to clump up when they were outnumbered. Taeil is buried in his datebook while Renjun lingers in the doorway with his arms crossed, Jisung peering over his shoulder.

The walls are papered over here as well, thick with ferns and red flowers unfurling and shades of darkness beneath it all, woodland depths beyond the vines. In another life Taeyong knew a boy from Jeju who said the forest watched you back, and came closer every time you looked away.

Taeyong was always bad at math, but he knows this much as he watches Kun and Lucas, so at ease in their skin here. Two vampires are less than the horde at Sicheng’s beck and call. If he’s scrambling from the fire back into the pan with Ten’s life cradled in his hands, it’s a start.

“Taeyong tells me he’s become a maker,” Kun stretches out along the only sofa and crosses his feet at the ankles. Without instruction Lucas sits on the floor and folds one long leg up to his chest, leaving room for Taeyong beside him. But he remains rooted next to Ten.

“It’s a shame I wasn’t there to guide him, but all that can be made right. John will come home with us where he belongs, and his human as well. I’ll take responsibility for them all. I know how you love your rules, darling.”

Jaehyun rolls his eyes, but Sicheng’s jaw is very tight. His gaze slides to Taeil, whose attention has been torn from his planner. The leather protests his white-knuckled hold.

“Unless there’s some reason you should object?” Kun asks, all innocence. It doesn’t fit his voice, like a foreign accent. “Let me see — you attacked a human, fully intending to let him die if Taeyong had been too far gone to turn him of his own volition. Do I have that right? I’m amazed. That doesn’t sound like my Win at all.”

“I’ll never understand why he tolerates you.” Jaehyun trains all his disgust upon the soles of Kun’s loafers.

Kun spreads his gloved hands. “Little boy, there are many, many things you will never understand. Learn to live with disappointment.”

Ten sighs. “Should we come back in a couple hours? This is like herding cats. You’re talking about my friends, not your dusty ass grudges. Move it along.”

“What Ten means,” Taeyong cuts in, “is that a lot has happened this year. We just want to know what comes next. If we have to settle our debt to get Johnny out of here, we’ll find a way.”

“Generous of you,” Kun agrees. “I hear no objections.”

“No,” Taeil snaps. “Enough. You can’t take him.”

Somewhere along the way Lucas seems to have caught the tune. He grins, lopsided, and his right hand drifts behind him to stroke Kun’s ankle. “But it’s _family_ ,” he objects, all exaggerated confusion. “You can’t expect us to abandon family. Any blood of Taeyong’s is blood of ours.”

“If I remember right you can fit your entire fist in your mouth.” Sicheng blinks his liquid dark eyes and his composure is like a hum of warning. “Do that.”

The hook nagging at the edge of Taeyong’s thoughts finally catches. Pulls. Unravels. “Fuck off,” he breathes, dizzy with fury and disbelief. “It wasn’t my blood that turned Johnny, was it?”

And the moment hangs in the air, as slow and as sudden as a person can fall from a great height. Yuta’s hand covers his mouth.

“You needed a civilizing influence and we gave you one,” Taeil supplies at last, when Sicheng is all granite silence. “If you were going to let him die you wouldn’t have come.”

“Was it your blood?” Taeyong wonders. Sicheng wasn’t there, and Jaehyun laughed. “Of course it was you. You’re the careful one.”

“We aren’t accustomed to leaving things to chance.” Taeil has disregarded the rest of them entirely. He watches Johnny’s stricken face. “A bit of glamour and no one the wiser. It was harder on the young ones,” he winces. “They felt like you were ours already.”

“He _is_ ours,” Jisung states, and doesn’t waver. Renjun’s expression is unreadable. But he doesn’t disagree, Taeyong thinks. Every one of them knew. Followed Johnny with their eyes. This house was all but an outstretched hand to him from the time they arrived.

“You don’t get to decide that for him,” Taeyong says, and Kun doesn’t step in. He never bats an eye. “Johnny doesn’t owe you anything.”

“I want to stay,” Johnny blurts out, so loud that for an instant Taeyong hears Shownu’s tread falter in a distant hall. Something fierce and hopeful blooms over his face. There’s nothing tactical about his position, Taeyong realizes, and aches with it. He’s standing with the people he trusts. “If you’re asking. I want to stay.”

 

 

Taeyong offers to teach Yuta to make a cold cucumber soup for summer, because the dead things of the house have little use for the kitchen. They’re alone here, just as Ten and Johnny are alone, silhouettes against the greenhouse. Cloves of garlic split beneath the flat of Taeyong’s blade and the air is sharp with scallions.

“You’re really going to ask me to come with, aren’t you?” Faint color warms Yuta’s cheek and he ducks his head over the vegetable peeler. “Can’t say I expected that.”

It feels like he’s swallowed a stone. “You always have a place with us. I should have—” he falters, and Yuta waits. “I should’ve been a better friend to you. You deserve more.”

“More than Johnny?” Yuta huffs, his fringe lifting and then falling back into place. “How long have I been telling you that you ought to think better of him?”

“This isn’t about some leftover jealousy,” Taeyong objects. “He hasn’t treated you well.”

“Taeyong, you _chose_ this whole toothy deal and as far as I can tell you’ve been a dick about it ever since,” Yuta sighs, not unkindly. He flattens his hands across the countertop. “Maybe you could cut him a break for once. I think he’s adjusted as well as anybody could expect to dying at twenty-six. He tried to follow your rules. He tried to be careful. And it’s my place to forgive the people I love when they tell me they’re sorry, and I know they’re scared.”

Taeyong splits the cucumbers and busies his hands scooping out the seeds. The words are slow to come.

“You love him?”

Yuta covers his hands with his own. “You know what makes me sad for you? There’s so much you don’t know. Half our lives happen when you’re asleep. You wake up every night and the world kept moving without you. So I get it. You have a hard time seeing the whole picture. But when my mom’s car got busted up last fall, Johnny took his Monday off once a month to drive us to Peoria and back. That’s a dull three hours each way letting Mom play Al Green and talk about book club. Should be faster,” he sighs, “but she makes everybody drive under the speed limit.”

There are so many shades of new information in one breath that Taeyong can barely shuffle them together.

“What’s in Peoria?” he asks dumbly.

Yuta slants him a pitying look. “Prison. Minimum security,” he shrugs. “But Dad’s wife gets real mean if we try to visit on weekends and if that bitch makes my mom cry again I’ll be the one in jail next.”

“You never said.”

“We can’t all have shiny vampire problems,” Yuta chides him. “Sometimes it’s just about showing up for the less exciting bits. And Johnny showed up for me. When you were sleeping and Ten was in his books, Johnny was the one bringing me saltines and ginger tea when that stomach bug knocked me out. He’s sweet to my mom and he’s never lied to me, and if all this shit hadn’t happened when it did we were still going somewhere. I know that. He knows that, finally.”

Yuta has sustained Taeyong with his own blood, come under his hand, watched his back, and not once did Taeyong bother to wonder about the map of his life where it extended out of sight. What was Yuta’s ocean, his ravine at sunset.

“Hey,” Yuta pulls him from his thoughts. “Don’t go guilt tripping now, we haven’t got much time. What I’m saying is, I can go where I want. I’m choosing to stay. I choose him. Sometimes you just know.”

Outside, hung in shadows like velvet, Ten kisses Johnny’s cheek. The tenderness Taeyong feels is too vast for his skin.

“He’s lucky to have you,” Taeyong says, and means it.

“God, I know you’re in love with me but keep it together,” Yuta scoffs, but his eyes are wet.

 

 

There’s nothing to pack. Ten and Taeyong are the leaving in the same clothes in which they arrived, brisk with fresh detergent. Ten’s jeans have been ironed. Without explanation, Sicheng and Kun vanish for an hour upstairs. Wonho insists on boxing up lunches for Ten and Jungwoo even though they’re only headed across town, and he presses bottles of vitamins and supplements on them as well.

In one of the open parlors off the foyer, Taeyong finds some semblance of privacy with Johnny. It’s a poor excuse for an apology with one foot out the door already.

With one thumb bleeding from the prick of his fang, he draws a line down Johnny’s brow.

“Be happy,” he says.

 

 

Crossing the threshold of their home, Ten clamps Taeyong’s bicep in a vise. Lucas has pulled away in a sleek imported car with Jungwoo for company, intent on exploring, and only Kun waits patiently for entry.

“Do you trust him?” Ten urges. There’s no point in closing the door in Kun’s face, clearly. He can hear them just as well regardless.

“He kept me sane for twenty years,” Taeyong offers. The words fit together strangely. He and Kun were never much for proclamations like this. Kun always found them vulgar, like Warhol and taxi cabs and red shoes. Ten was the one who demanded promises and clear-eyed loyalty. _If you’re trying to get rid of me, hurry it up,_ he used to say when he was young. Until Taeyong could only swear, _never. We’ll look out for each other._

“Come inside,” Ten says, and scarcely waits until Kun’s soles have touched the floor. “Tell me something.”

“Ask what you like.” Kun clasps his gloved hands behind his back. He surveys the hanging strands of crystal and the marked walls, Ten’s raven and a sprawling tree, circles inside circles marked with shapes that no longer look whimsical at all. “We’re going to be very well acquainted.”

“If we stick with you, Sicheng won’t collect on what we stole, is that right?”

“Consider yourself untouchable,” Kun murmurs, and yet again Taeyong has the sense of staring down a vast corridor shadowed with shapes and meaning he can’t discern.

“Whose skull is in the library?” Ten’s fascination sounds genuine, but he wastes no time in waiting. He fishes his cellular phone from under the sofa and plugs it into a charger, then pulls one of the green velvet cushions down and rips its seam with the knife Shownu never collected back from him.

“No one in particular.” At Ten’s disbelieving look, Kun’s mouth tightens with a hint of amusement. “You seem surprised.”

“You knew exactly what you were doing, and how Sicheng would react. He should’ve been sweating bullets,” Ten adds, even as he pulls tightly wrapped bills from inside the cushion. He stacks them on the kitchen counter and then disappears onto his belly. A sound of wood cracking, and Taeyong finds him prying trim from beneath a cabinet. “I’m listening,” he calls back to Kun, coughing over the dust.

“Your tastes have improved,” Kun murmurs, too low for Ten to overhear. “Ask me what you really want to know,” he calls.

Ten hoists himself back up, pink with the rush of blood to his head. There are more bills, these wrapped in plastic sandwich bags, and he adds them to his pile. Dizziness creeps in the edge of Taeyong’s skull.

Hopping onto the counter, Ten pauses. “Sicheng acts like it’s something important. Whose skull does he say it is?”

At this, Kun’s smile shows his teeth. In the midst of unscrewing the glass bowl from the dead fixture overhead, the one they never use, Ten pauses uncertainly.

“He tells them it’s our maker.”

“Did he off him or something?” Ten passes the discolored glass bowl down to Taeyong without looking, its insides coated thickly with dust and dead gnats. Beside the empty sockets overhead are two more plastic bundles secured with black electrical tape.

“Not at all,” Kun demurs. He sketches a single concise gesture encompassing his person. “His maker is quite well, as you can see.”

This pleases him very much, the lift of one brow gives him away. Taeyong has only ever seen Lucas make him laugh in earnest. “I could count on one hand the people who know what I’m telling you now. Perhaps you’ll choose to trust me, with that in mind.”

“Why lie for him?” Ten asks, but Taeyong can only picture the library, the flash of their tongues behind their teeth as they argued in their secret language. The way they kissed, and Sicheng seemed both furious and starved at once.

“He has grand ambitions, my lovely boy.”

“And you want him to have what he wants,” Taeyong hears himself, distant.

“Some masters are greedy,” Kun nods minutely. “Others know when to let go. And if Sicheng were seen as beholden to the one who made him, he would lack authority.”

Ten’s expression could chip granite. “Well isn’t that nice for him. He’s got everything he wants and the local crooks in his pocket besides.”

“Do you think he hosted that self-important census for nothing?” Kun walks the perimeter of the living room, hands cupping forearms behind his back once more, and touches nothing. “His plans are many and long-reaching, and I humor him with my astonishment. He thinks he wants to be king.”

Taeyong stares. “King of what?” 

“Of America,” Kun says.

 

 

Upstairs, Lucas laughs in answer to Jungwoo’s startled gasp. There is no sound from Kun, not a sigh or a creaking floorboard, but his presence is no less felt. Taeyong can picture him now with startling clarity. Sitting on the edge of Ten’s bed, his legs crossed, spine straight as he watches Lucas turn his new prize inside out with wanting.

Ten hears none of this, counting up his money and tidying the stacks. Their makeshift bed is just piled blankets on the rug and cushions pulled down from the sofa. The curtains over each window are secured with binder clips and safety pins and not even the yellow street lamp glow creeps in.

“You really are bad at math,” he shakes his head.  “Anybody could rob you blind.”

Taeyong swallows. “I don’t understand.”

Now Ten colors, averting his eyes. He takes up a pile of bills and begins to sort them so that the numbers and faces all align. The fangs of the demon inked over his hand flex with his knuckles.

“I was going to tell you soon. Before everything,” he adds quietly, too small a word for the past months.

“No,” Taeyong falters. Frustration makes white noise of his thoughts, words dissolving. He wants to take Ten by the shoulders and shake him from his skin. “You could have _left_ ,” he grits out. “All this time. You could go right now and start over.”

The air seems to rush from the room like low tide. The bundle in Ten’s grasp begins to smoke dangerously and he snarls a curse, dropping it before it can catch flame.

“You’ve said some stupid shit over the years,” he shakes, every ring on his fingers betraying him as they throw back shards of light, “and I’m counting the time you said Rosa and Gina were just friends. But congrats, babe, that’s the dumbest thing that’s ever come out of your mouth.”

“Shut up,” he snaps before Taeyong can speak. He’s angry like Taeyong has never seen him angry, and he should know better than anyone how quickly Ten can move. He taught him how. Still he hasn’t braced himself when he’s knocked backward, his skull cracking against the floor with a hollow sound.

“You okay?” Ten asks tightly, the iron weight of his forearm across Taeyong’s chest receding as his sinks to straddle his thighs instead. Dazed, Taeyong nods. “Good.” There’s no more hesitation when Ten kisses him. He’s laying claim to territory he already owns, every hidden part of Taeyong painted in his colors.

Flushed, his chest rising like a sail with the force of his breath, he holds Taeyong by the jaw with his burning fingertips.

“Every time I think we’re getting somewhere, you bolt in the wrong direction,” he says, very softly. He knows Taeyong can hear him. “Aren’t we partners? Aren’t we equal?” He shifts down onto his elbow for balance. Deliberate, unblinking, he pushes a thigh up between Taeyong’s legs.

“You underestimate me a lot,” he continues, a rasp edging his breath as his hips rock down for friction. “And that was fine before. But we’re done with that. You’re going to come for me like this,” he adds lightly. He gasps, pleased, as Taeyong shudders and claws at his hips to drag him closer.

“You’re the one who tries to leave,” Ten says, after. He bats Taeyong’s hands away and peels his boxers off to dab him clean with a damp kitchen towel that chafes over sensitive skin. After a moment’s hesitation he curls his hand beneath to feel the weight of Taeyong in his palm, and shivers all over with it. Taeyong is held to the floor as if by silver pins, watching him. Letting Ten undress him in inches, letting himself be seen.

Something must show in his face. Ten curls into his side and pulls the quilt over them both. His heart knocks against Taeyong’s arm.

“If I were a better person,” Taeyong begins, but can’t finish. He turns his face into Ten’s hair.

“Don’t be,” Ten mumbles back, biting his shoulder. His arm is warm over Taeyong’s waist. “If you ever try to leave, I’ll find you.”

Under the weight of dawn, he might imagine what Ten whispers. All he sees is blackness, his limbs are stone, and he slips away from himself like shedding a skin.

_Why does everyone deserve to be happy but you?_

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with love: for aris, steadfast beta, who makes me look good.
> 
> and there is no greater hypewoman in the world than ayesha -- without her unfathomable support and enthusiasm this story wouldn't exist
> 
> > [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
> > [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)  
> > [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/1264475943/playlist/5w6jOTTOfzUWTngYkvqIOw?si=LFL0TJJ4SgSO89IBIO30JA)


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